 Among pantheons of gods, mutants, and actual magicians, Batman may just be the most grounded superhero of them all. Hi, I'm Kyle, and I say outrageous things. A couple months ago, I claimed that I could defeat most of Spider-Man's villains armed with only my own body and a gun I don't know how to use. I was quickly humbled by my premise, and I've taken time to reflect on my hubris. But you all demanded punishment in the form of a follow-up video about Batman villains, so here I am. Batman's skill set is uniquely achievable for an A-Lister comic book hero, and his villains are usually more calibrated to that level of realism, so I might actually stand a pretty good chance. Penguin, I could kick him. The Riddler, Shadow, Echo. The Doctor was the mother. I have a phone. That guy shoots ketchup. I got this in the bag! Okay, look, I'm sorry, I can't do this. I'd be lying if I tried to match the energy from the previous video. I know you all, like, wanted me to do kind of the same thing, and don't get me wrong, I could easily take Coniment King, but, like, I kind of learned my lesson last time. Most of these guys are career criminals, and they probably have their own gun. And I'm not Batman. I mean, like, I could be. Technique, like, it's possible, you know, like I don't have to be bitten by a radioactive spider. I just have to be a billionaire, which is equally as impossible. But, like, they exist, you know? Like, billionaires exist. Uh, but Batman doesn't. Hey, what the hell? Nor the bearded one. That guy's on another plane and dead, and he just ran away. Go find him. How hard is that? Anyway, why don't we have a Batman? His only power is money, and not even that much of it, relatively speaking. Is it just way harder than it seems? Or are real-life rich people incredibly boring? In 2015, author Thaddeus Howells published an article to Gizmodo estimating the cost of being Batman, which is awesome because I didn't have to do that part myself. His estimate came out to $682,450,750. That included things like Batman's suit, training, equipment, vehicles, space of operations, and a steady supply of boy wonders. Using an online calculator and zero knowledge about the economy, I've adjusted that number to $884,101,922 in today's dollars. In comparison to the net worth of Earth's wealthiest individuals, that is approximately f***ing nothing. That is less than a billion dollars. There are 2,640 billionaires in the world right now. That is 2,640 people who could be Batman and are majorly dropping the ball. And in case you think that sounds unfair to someone at the bottom of the scale, because this appears to be most of a billion dollars and surely more than they could afford, you can rest assured that even the most dirt poor down on their luck baby billionaire could spend all of this money and still have more than a hundred average Americans make in their entire lives. And that's assuming average means making $50,000 a year consistently. Does that include you? I bet it doesn't. While I'm certain that any of these people could more than fund their own superhero enterprise, I think there must be one ideal candidate. One would be that person who is letting us down more than anybody else. Going through all 2.6,000 options is a little insurmountable for this video and also unnecessary. We can just treat this like a dating app or an online search for another therapist and whittle away large portions of potential dark knights by introducing additional criteria. Broad strokes first, I'm only going to include Americans. Not only do we have more billionaires than anyone else, but when it comes to dispensing vigilante justice on disproportionately impoverished and mentally unwell lawbreakers, no one wants it more than us. That brings the number to 735, which already saves us a lot of time. Next up, let's filter by age. Our Batman will have to hold up to strenuous physical training, a lot of street fights, and daily zipline travel. Average human peak athletic performance is between the ages of 25 and 30, and according to Frank Miller's Batman Year 1, Bruce Wayne started Batmaning at age 26. So that tracks. Fudging a little bit to allow for money, pure audacity, and probably drugs? Definitely drugs. I'm generously expanding our range up to 40 years old, which removes most billionaires. There's only 22 Americans under the age of 41 with a net worth of 1 billion or greater, and that's the number we can work with. But I still hit a snag here. When I first started my research, I thought I would just be able to rank all 22 billionaires on a collection of essential Batman-erisms, things like intelligence and quality of chin. But it actually ended up being way more difficult and expected to research these people equally, like Stanley Tang, who is one of three founders of DoorDash and barely has a Wikipedia page. And then there are others, who are Taylor Swift. So how do I narrow this list down further if I can't learn more about each of their personalities equally? Are the public figures the best option specifically because they put themselves out there and probably would shine their logo into the sky? Or are the lesser known billionaires the best option specifically because of their discretion? Or is it Taylor Swift? We all want it to be Taylor Swift, or at least I do, so I could just end the video there. But I'm still not satisfied with any of those options. So I decided to do something that I never actually intended to do when I started this project. I looked up stuff about Batman. I have a confession to make. I don't actually know anything about Batman. I've watched the Nolan movies, and I've enjoyed an Adam West meme or two, but I've just never found him that compelling as a character. Peter Parker, that's just you and me. Some confused kid making mistakes, trying his best. But Bruce Wayne? He's a self-sustained 1%er with near-infinite resources, obsessed with committing an acceptable amount of violence just to avoid dealing with a trauma that he refuses to go to therapy for. I think he's a great representation of a man with a billion dollars, and that's why I made this video. But after reading extensive Wikipedia summaries about his past and his struggles and his journey, I've come to realize that I was way more right than I ever thought. Bruce Wayne is a psycho, and he's very eager to let you know. Some highlights from his past. When he was a teenager, he stood up to a school bully by beating the hell out of him, covering his body in poison ivy, and later locking him in a boiler room. Later at the same school, Bruce was asked to answer a math question involving the speed of a bullet. He had coped so little with the aforementioned trauma that he responded by setting fire to his professor's lawn in a shape that the professor somehow immediately interpreted as the answer to his earlier question, and not just a flaming circle. And in this one time when he was 18, Bruce traveled the world for seven years, going through the most grueling physical training imaginable just so he could dress up as a bat and beef real hard with a clown in the worst city in America. Seriously, why did no one get this boy some therapy? Oh, turns out they did, and it was this guy. New complaint. Why did no one hire for Bruce Wayne, the child, an actual therapist instead of an anime villain? Were they trying to turn him into Batman? Maybe. A lot of the circumstances of his origin story are way too convenient to be an accident. Also, in another timeline, his dad, Thomas Wayne, becomes Batman after the death of his son. How does that happen? They're not the same person, they're just related. How did they both come up with the same dumb secret identity? That doesn't make any sense. I think... That is a different video, and that is why I don't read. Based on these new revelations about Bruce Wayne's disposition, I can now narrow down my list of billionaires even further. I'll be at a bit subjectively by removing some of the more level-headed options. Your crypto bros, your app designers, and LeBron James. He wouldn't be able to pull it off anyway. Like if he showed up to a crime scene dressed as Batman, everybody would be like, you're LeBron James. After several days of careful consideration, I have selected our five finalists. So without further ado, ranked according to fitness, audacity, discretion, and hell of a chin, let's meet our contestants. Coming in at number five, we have... Palmer Lucky. Inventor of the Oculus Rift. He's 31, worth almost $2 billion, and slipped in right under the wire on audacity alone. Seriously, nothing else. Notable achievements in increasing order of insanity include building railguns in his garage, funding high-tech sentry towers to catch immigrants, and creating a VR headset loaded with bombs that kills you if you die in a video game. Just for fun? No one asked him to. Also, his brother-in-law is Matt Gaetz. That's not relevant, but it is true. He only made the list because I truly think more than any of his peers he wishes he could be Batman. But he's not. Number four is Taylor Swift. You bet she made it to the finals. She's great at branding, has excellent presence, and is publicly vindictive. Combine that with a net worth of $1.1 billion and being in great physical shape at 34 years old, and the only reason she's at number four is because she's honestly way too cool to be Batman. Number three, Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital. His brother is Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former senior advisor to Donald Trump during those weird years. Josh inherited his initial fortune, putting him more socially in line with Bruce Wayne, and he made the final three because on paper, he's got everything he needs. He's smart, he's defiant, he married a model, and he sure looks the part. Unfortunately, he committed the greatest billionaire sin of them all. He's so boring! I just removed a bunch of people for this, and none of them were set up like Josh. When he quietly became the first billionaire in his family, his uncle-in-law was the president. He had all the resources he could possibly need to like, I don't know, learn every martial art on Earth, or fly jet planes, or go to space. But no, he just invests in things. Rich people are so boring. Number two, The Runner Up. This is either going to be completely expected, or completely out of left field. It's Mark Zuckerberg. 39 years old, founder of Facebook, and fifth richest person in the world with $125 billion. I want you to know, I was this close to making it Mark Zuckerberg. I wanted to so bad, it would have been hilarious. But, I have to be honest, Bruce Wayne, for all of his faults, is at least trying to help people most of the time. And Mark Zuckerberg is absolutely not. First, the pros. He studied psychology and computer science at Harvard University, speaks multiple languages, and comes pre-trained in mixed martial arts and Brazilian jujitsu. Plus, he's ripped as hell, like in a startling way. He even shares Bruce's violently impotent outbursts. According to one former Facebook employee, he would sometimes threaten his workers with a katana, saying, if you don't get that done sooner, I will chop you with this huge sword, while holding a huge sword. That's very Bruce. Unfortunately, Mark never put any of these skills toward caped crusading because he was too busy building and maintaining an engine of the world's demise called Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's crimes against humanity are a bit heavy to cover in a Batman video, but in very brief summary, his desire for power has resulted in untold damages to the minds of Facebook's users, the destabilization of multiple governments, and several genocides. It's a lot. You're just gonna have to look into it. And I think when you specifically choose to be the villain, you no longer get to be Batman. That leaves, at long last, our Dark Knight. If you find yourself being mugged in an alleyway and a cloaked figure drops onto your assailant from above, makes a casual pun and then fades into the shadows, it's likely that you just ran into Ryan Breslow. He's a 29-year-old hippie billionaire and founder of Bolt, an online checkout service that makes it faster for you to make bad decisions at 2 a.m. Now, I know he may look like an underwhelming choice, and also a little bit like a youth pastor trying way too hard to be your friend, even though he's definitely still got some problems to work through on his own, but he's got something that the others don't. Potential. He's obsessed with physical fitness and he publicly calls out other tech companies on their shady business practices. Plus, dude's all chin. His biggest problem is that it all feels very performative or optimistically naive. His fitness interest mostly involves preaching wellness habits that come suspiciously easy to rich white dudes, and he boasts that he's not afraid of bothering a few powerful people while being a billionaire. We know he's not a superhero because he would brag about it anytime somebody asked him about his workout routine, but he's only missing one key quality to becoming the hero we all need. And I... I do not know what that is. I have spent days researching these losers only to learn the one thing I already knew, which is that they have more power and money than history's greatest emperors, and yet they do nothing. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mean, the question was who isn't being Batman the most. But the problem is that they have no problems. There's just no motivation to do anything. Nothing bad has ever... Oh, I figured it out. I know what it is. The missing ingredient. The thing that sets Bruce Wayne apart and keeps any of these guys from being cool is that none of them saw their parents shot in the back alley. It makes perfect sense. Bruce Wayne stands out because he was subjected to the same violence and loss as the common man. Granted, once, but it was a hell of a formative one. Everybody here grew up with either very wealthy, very alive parents or... No, that's everyone. Unfortunately, we just can't go back in time and change that. So, no Batman. Yet, some of them probably have kids. So what we do is we send out some theater tickets. Ahem. Uh, I've been advised by our producers to cut the previous segment because it may be misconstrued as disapproval and or overt threats to our benevolent and rat-as-hell billionaire colleagues. You have my sincere apologies. You all could be Batman. It's a very low bar. And most of that bar is money, which you have all of. So please be Batman. Just do something interesting. And also, the only reason I'm able to keep doing any of these videos is because of the people who are currently donating. So thank you so, so much. Please leave any suggestions for future topics. Thank you to everybody who did suggest this idea. Um, I'm sincerely sorry. Uh, Condiment King shoots ketchup. I think it's from the Adam West TV show. No, no, I remember now because I read all of this. He was introduced in later Batman cartoons, making fun of the type of villain that used to appear in the Adam West television show. So he's a joke even in the comic book lore, but he does exist. And Batman does fight the Condiment King. The kid wasn't shot. His parents were after the movie. It's not the same situation. I'm obviously referencing the comic book. You don't kill the children. You kill me while his son is watching. Cut that part.