Headcanon that, when an actual Wayne is in charge of Wayne Enterprises, their profit margins shrink... because the actual Wayne family refuses to engage in looter capitalism and overrules their board of directors.
This didn’t start with the company’s founder. Alan Wayne was a classic Robber Baron who sucked Gotham dry using tactics of questionable legality and even more questionable morality to build his company. To him, these were “the price of doing business.” (Alan Wayne is very definitely in Hell, which is proven to exist in the DCU.)
Alan, unlike most Capital-C Capitalists, somehow ended up raising a son with more morals than he had. However, Thomas Wayne may have been a brilliant surgeon... but he was not necessarily the best at running a company. However, Martha Wayne nee Kane was widely reknowned as a woman you do not cross if you value your balls. She kept the board in line over the course of her marriage despite the fact that her husband was technically the primary shareholder, and with her at the helm, Gotham was able to recover from constant vampirism by the legacy of Alan Wayne.
Then Crime Alley, and suddenly the largest stockholder in Wayne Enterprises is an eight-year-old child.
The board of directors decides that this is a license to do anything they want. And with “that woman” out of the way, they do. Wayne Enterprises spends about sixteen years absolutely ravaging the economy of Gotham, holding parties while Rome burns. The Wayne fortune balloons from multi-millions into billions, and each of the board members is eyeing it hungrily, hoping to declare Bruce dead so that they can fall upon it like starving hyenas.
When Bruce returns, he at first directs The Batman’s ire against the various Gotham Mafias that are squabbling over the scraps that his company leaves behind. But it doesn’t take the world’s third-greatest detective long to look at his fortune, look at Gotham’s economy, and add two and two to get four. Over the next few years, his priority becomes shaking loose the members of his board most responsible for the disaster, in some cases going outside the law and using tactics that would make Nate Ford proud. By the time he has adopted a small circus child, Bruce has reinstated himself as the Wayne CEO... and, to the horror of Gotham’s wealthy, laid out a new direction for his company. Wayne Enterprises’ cancerous profit margins slow to a dead crawl, and Bruce begins to spend huge chunks of his personal fortune on Gotham infrastructure, opening cheap grocery stores in food deserts, and building affordable apartments in areas of the city where finding housing is otherwise nearly impossible.
After all, that money is stolen from the people of Gotham. It’s only fair that he gives it back.
