Adrian Veidt is known as The Smartest Man In The World. His intellect is so well developed that, coupled with his exceptional martial-arts skills, he has been able to train himself even to catch bullets.

Veidt also has tremendous wealth – a result of his aggressive marketing of his Ozymandias persona combined with astute reinvestments of his wealth based on the direction he projects for society and the global markets.

As a teen, Adrian Veidt gave away his parents' fortune to charity and pursued his obsession with the conquests of Alexander the Great, eventually taking on the identity of the costumed hero Ozymandias. Ozymandias went on to become one of the most celebrated of the "new generation" of heroes that included Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, and the new incarnations of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre.

Ozymandias retired in 1975 and made a fortune merchandising his superhero image. He subsequently built a personal retreat in Antarctica (Karnak) and engineered a magnificent mutant lynx (Bubastis) as a companion.

Ozymandias was a member of the Crimebusters super-group prior to his retirement in 1975. He remains a close friend and ally to his former colleagues, though some of them (like Rorschach) look on his shameless self-promotion with disdain.

• The character of Ozymandias is based largely on the comic-book superhero Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt.
  
  
• Ozymandias's name is a reference to poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (about a conquering hero whose empire has fallen into dust).
  
  
• Veidt's line of action figures includes Bubastis. His advisers tried to convince him to market figures based on Rorschach, Nite Owl, and Moloch, but Veidt rejected those as unethical.