Tony Stark is the invincible armor-clad superhero better known as Iron Man. This billionaire genius weaponeer got his start after he was kidnapped by terrorists and forced to build weapons for them - an event he turned to his advantage when he defied them and built the first Iron Man suit.
Of course, being a genius only goes so far when one doesn't have the same resources as a billionaire like Stark. Building high-tech mech suits such as the ones he wears to bust up the Hulk or fly through space is not a cheap expenditure. However, not everything Tony spends money on is designed to save the world. Here are 10 things armored Avenger wasted money on.
10 Storing Armor On Mars
Tony Stark has a lot of different Iron Man suits he's made over the years. To name just a few noteworthy examples, there's the Mark I, the Silver Centurion, Hulkbuster, Godbuster, and Fin Fang Foom Buster. All these suits take up a lot of space and Iron Man needs somewhere to store his unmanned armor.
In 2018's Avengers #5, Stark reveals that not only had he built a Godbuster Mark II (which is itself an ungodly crazy thing to contemplate), but he also was keeping it parked on Mars. Apparently, there was plenty of available real estate.
9 Renting Disneyland For A Day
Tony Stark once rented out Disneyland for a day. He literally had the park closed so he could have it to himself as he interviewed a woman for a job position in his company, breaking the hearts of every child on vacation who had traveled with their families to ride Space Mountain and get their picture taken with Mickey.
When asked about this stunt, Tony simply stated: "I hate crowds." It's hard not to see the irony of an arrogant multibillionaire like Tony renting out Disneyland when his likeness is now owned along with every other Marvel character by the Disney Corporation - a company who's estimated worth of $128.8 billion is used for things other than saving Earth from Thanos.
8 Dancing Soccer Robots
After completing one of the longest stints any creator ever worked on Spider-Man, writer Dan Slott started working on Tony Stark: Iron Man. The first issue opens 25 years in the past when Tony Stark was still a child as the boy enters a robotics tournament. A song announces Tony's entry into the competition through a booming "Y'ALL READY FOR THIS?"
As the music blares, mini soccer robots swarm the arena, performing acrobatic Pelé-inspired moves before dancing boastfully to celebrate their own awesomeness. Of course, it's a lot easier to build showboating Robo-athletes for geniuses whose parents are independently rich than it is when begging for grant money to fund a project.
7 Talking Animals
This is another detail introduced in Slott's run on Tony Stark: Iron Man. After hiring a new recruit to his team, Tony Stark gives the man a tour of Stark Enterprises (or, at least a hologram of Tony gives the tour because genius billionaire playboy superheroes have important things to do with their IRL non-holographic meat-bodies).
Among the inventions on display is tech that enables cats and dogs to talk. When one of the cats is accused of drinking all the milk, the feline genius overlord responds by characteristically blaming it on the dog.
6 Avengers Mansion
There are not a lot of rich superheroes out there. In fact, most billionaires fit into the supervillain category, sitting on hoarded mountains of wealth instead of doing something useful with their money like ending world hunger or building a Hulkbuster mech suit.
As the only billionaire on the Avengers, Iron Man has often funded the team. After the Avengers: Disassembled event, the New Avengers formed up and needed a base of operations. To help them out, Tony Stark sold them Avengers Mansion for a dollar - a prime piece of New York real estate. Later, Luke Cage sold it back for five bucks. One doesn't need to be a genius to know that's bad business.
5 Sol's Hammer
A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical megastructure named for the mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson, which is theoretically capable of harnessing all the excess radiation of the sun to power technology. Tony Stark built his own personal Dyson Sphere, which he named Sol's Hammer.
Such a valuable energy source is definitely not a waste and could have ended Earth's dependence on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, this Dyson Sphere was destroyed when the alien Shi'ar attacked the Earth. Later, it fell into the hands of anti-mutant extremists who used it in their genocidal plans. Not exactly building a bright future.
4 Printer Paper & Ink
Printer ink is prohibitively expensive, but since billionaires buy in bulk, it is pretty hard to imagine just what sort of printing demands Iron Man could possibly have that would be considered a waste of his considerable resources.
In the Fear Itself storyline, Tony gets drunk while operating the Iron Man armor. His enemies conspire to use this against him and he is given a subpoena to turn over ninety days' worth of biometric data collected by his armor. Stark complies, printing the data they ask for. All of it. There are so many pages printed that he fills the trailers of nineteen big rig trucks, forcing the people investigating him to dig through the stacks one page at a time.
3 Booze
It is pretty common knowledge that Tony Stark is an alcoholic. The story "Demon in a Bottle" is all about his struggle with substance abuse and is considered by many fans to be the definitive Iron Man story.
Several times throughout the comics, Stark falls off the wagon, and almost every time he does this, it is an emotional heartbreaking scene. In one particular instance in Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers, Tony is bracing for the end of the world - something he only failed to stop. He lines shot glasses up along his bar and fills each with the liquor he wants to savor in the moments the world ends. One can only imagine the price tag on such a bottle.
2 Sports Cars
Someone who can operate a flying mech suit has no need of a car. Then again, no one really needs the types of luxury sports cars Tony drives. Like many rich people, he likes to enjoy the finer things in life. He also tends to indulge in such splendor.
Admittedly, Stark's company did develop an ecologically friendly smart car. However, Tony Stark has a lot of sports cars which are definitely not environmentally friendly so he's not only spending his money frivolously but spending it on classic muscle cars whose exhaust output could be described as environmental war crimes.
1 Area 51
There is no roundabout way to say this: Tony Stark bought Area 51. Yes, that Area 51. The same one that supposedly houses the Roswell alien spacecraft and that the entirety of the internet was planning to bum rush last year.
As Stark describes the transaction, he just happened to see that the government had put it up for sale and so decided to buy it. Whether the site was acquired to stroke his ego or because he thought he might learn something from old alien tech on the premises in unclear, this definitely seems like a frivolous expenditure.