Norman Osborn (Earth-21399)

Early Life
Norman Osborn was the son of Amberson Osborn, a wealthy munitions magnate who operated primarily out of New York. After Osborn Industries' business began floundering, Amberson frequently took out his frustrations on his family, instilling into Norman a fear of becoming a failure like his father.

Business Career
Norman met his wife, Emily Lyman, in college when he was studying chemistry, marrying her after they completed their degrees and later having a son together, whom they named Harry. Around the same time, Norman also met and befriended two classmates: Richard Parker and Curtis Connors.

Norman eventually inherited the family company after Amberson's death. Under Norman's leadership, Osborn Industries was rebranded as OsCorp and changed its focus from manufacturing to research and development, with Richard and Connors as his head scientists.

Richard and Connors' pet project was Project Moreau, which aimed to take the special abilities of various animals and translate them into solutions to societal problems. Unfortunately, once the military started outsourcing its advanced weapons research to the private sector, Norman started seeing dollar signs and the chance to gain prove himself better than his father, so he suggested that Project Moreau focus on weapons development - something Richard and Connors vehemently disagreed with.

Norman ignored his friends' wishes and ultimately went ahead with weapons development, hiring out Alistair Smythe to be his head engineer. When Norman's two college friends discovered this, Connors was furious and got into an altercation with Norman. Their fight resulted in a laboratory accident that destroyed Connors' right arm. Richard later resigned from OsCorp in protest, taking his research with him. Norman later allowed Connors himself the chance to leave in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement and monetary settlement, to which Connors agreed.

Shutting Out
At some point, Emily suddenly fell ill with a degenerative condition, with the doctors stating that treatments would only serve to delay the inevitable. Norman, desperate not to lose his wife, hired out a group of his corporate security officers to raid Richard Parker's house for his research, hoping to work on a cure. Unfortunately, their search proved unsuccessful, and forced Richard to attempt to flee the country.

When Richard died in a plane crash, Norman assumed he had taken his research with him and gave up on the cure, resolving to live out the rest of his time with Emily as best he could.

Emily finally died around the time when Harry was completing middle school. Seeing too much of Emily in his son, Norman sent Harry away to a private school upstate and buried himself in his work with OsCorp, becoming increasingly more sullen and ruthless over time.

Controlling New York
Without a family to provide emotional stability, Norman's fear of failure manifested itself again - this time as a desire to control all the major industries in New York and ensure he was the most successful businessman in the city. Among his more notable hostile takeovers were those of the aviation engineering firm Bestman Aerodynamics and the R&D startup Horizon Labs.

Bestman Aerodynamics
Norman Osborn took note of the designs that Bestman put forward while in pursuit of a military contract and felt insulted by the fact that its CEO, a "small-time old man" named Adrian Toomes, could produce such sophisticated technology. Shortly after OsCorp acquired the contract, Osborn reached out directly to Toomes and offered him the chance to merge Bestman Aerodynamics into OsCorp so that both parties could benefit from the contract. Toomes refused because he didn't want to share the credit for his inventions with a man whose lifestyle and ethics he vehemently disliked. Osborn wouldn't take no for an answer, however, and the case ended up going to court. The judge ultimately ruled in favor of OsCorp, resulting in Bestman Aerodynamics being officially merged. As one final insult, Osborn fired Toomes immediately after the merger was complete, leaving Toomes without a steady income.

Horizon Labs
Norman eventually heard from Curtis Connors again, this time because Connors had founded a new R&D startup called Horizon Labs to continue Richard Parker's work. Norman saw this as a clear violation of their settlement, and began desiring Connor's research in the hopes that he could sell it off as another military contract.

To this end, Norman filed an ethics complaint against the startup, citing falsified embezzlement allegations against Connors. The authorities who arrived confiscated numerous pieces of equipment - among them the population of genetically enhanced spiders and Doctor Connors' research notes on a "reptile-based physiological enhancement formula". Shortly after Connors' disappearance, investor confidence in Horizon Labs plummeted to the point where the company was liquidated and its employees were merged into OsCorp, among them an engineering researcher named Otto Octavius.

Creating Electro
To be added...