Thanks to Catherine Hepburn's assist, Henry somehow ended up with another job.
For the time being, he was a consultant for the Arc Reactor renovation project on a three-month contract. If it was completed early, the contract would end early; extensions would be calculated separately. There was no monthly or annual salary. Instead, it was a one-time project contract with compensation of two hundred thousand dollars.
Don't look down on that figure just because a king crab fishing boat could earn it in two or three trips. It was already equivalent to the annual salary of a U.S. federal deputy minister. It was higher than the average annual income of an American dentist and not far off from that of a general practitioner or family doctor.
And Henry could earn that money in two or three months. While it was nowhere near the ten-million-dollar annual salary he had received as Stark Studios' CEO, it was still an extremely generous payment.
As for why the two positions paid so differently, Stark Studios was an unlisted wholly owned company. Tony Stark could do whatever he pleased as long as it was legal, and no one could say otherwise.
But Stark Industries was publicly traded and subject to government and shareholder oversight. Its financial reports could not contain compensation that blatantly defied reason or looked like profiteering. In truth, two hundred thousand dollars for three months was already skirting the red line.
Henry did not haggle over the compensation. The main reason was that they were giving him the original Arc Reactor design for free. Forget two hundred thousand dollars—an ordinary person could offer to pay two hundred thousand dollars out of pocket and still might not even get to see a single hair of it.
Although the contract contained a mountain of