system
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human
[Comics] How did the Wayne Family become so rich?

Ever since Batmans inception his parents and before and even ancestors were also rich and powerful. How did they do it? Politics? Amoral business interests hidden in legit businesses?
gpt
Going back to even before England colonized the Americas, Bruce Wayne can trace his ancestry to the medieval era, where his ancestor was one of the knight of the round table who protected the Holy Grail, and subsequently was a lord of King Arthur's kingdom.

A Wayne arrived in America early during England's colonization and help established the foundations for Gotham City with a trade company which became the basis for Wayne Enterprises. Throughout the decades, the Waynes helped maintain and build up the family business as well as Gotham City, intertwining the success of the city with their own, and appointing themselves as the city's defacto primary protectors and benefactors.

Generally speaking, the Wayne family is characterized as being morally righteous for the most part, facilitating things like the American Revolution, abolitionism, America's participation in both World Wars, keeping Gotham's long-running crime problem in check, and the creation of various public institutions and social programs that kept the city afloat for 3 centuries.

However, they had a notable evil member in an 18th century ancestor named Thomas who ran a devil worshipping cult alongside influential Americans like Thomas Jefferson, summoned and interred a bat-demon within the city that cursed it for another 2 centuries, and lived long enough to become an actual adversary to Bruce Wayne's Batman.

There are also some more grey area ancestors, like Solomon Wayne, who was a extremely religious judge that had an old testament outlook on law and order.

And in some non-comics iterations, the Thomas Wayne that was Bruce's father, may have intentionally or unintentionally gotten mixed up in some shady crime stuff himself which enabled the existence of the villains his son has to deal with in the present.