Elihas Starr was a government scientist who was caught and jailed after smuggling blueprints out of work, presumably to sell on the black market. The media dubbed him "Egghead," and he was soon contacted and freed by a high-placed crime lord, who gave him the charge of proving his worth by defeating the original Ant-Man. Although using his technological expertise, Egghead failed and narrowly avoided capture.

Time and again, he would try to defeat Hank Pym, such as trying to use Ant-Man’s new partner, the Wasp, as bait, or trying to trick Ant-Man into fighting against Spider-Man. Egghead regarded Pym as his arch-nemesis and grew desperate to prove Pym’s genius was inferior to his own.

Giving up on pure revenge, Egghead tried to form a short-lived alliance with the Mad Thinker and the Puppet Master. They hoped to use a orbiting laser death ray to extort money from the United States, but were defeated by the Avengers when Barney Barton, brother of Hawkeye (then, Goliath), tipped off the heroes. Tragically, Barney died in the ensuing battle. Later, Egghead would use the Swordsman (Jacques Duquesne) to capture Goliath, thinking him Hank Pym, but Hawkeye-as-Goliath soon defeated both criminals, avenging his brother.

Escaping from prison, Egghead planned to use a mind-transferal machine to rob Pym of his intelligence, and went so far as to test it on his own niece, Trish Starr, before being defeated by Pym-as-Ant-Man again. Egghead, in revenge, planted a bomb in his niece’s car, who survived the blast but lost her left arm.

A later incident found Egghead forming the Emissaries of Evil. He led the Cobalt Man, the Rhino, and Solarr in capturing a NASA space lab as a headquarters, and then set about trying to capture the Star of Capistan, which was in the possession of the Defenders. Egghead sent the Emissaries to fight the heroes, secretly rigging the Cobalt Man’s armor to explode in hopes to kill the Defenders. But when the Defenders helped the Cobalt Man survive, he discovered Egghead’s treachery and turned on him. In the resulting battle, the Cobalt Man triggered a nuclear explosion, Egghead was presumed dead as the laboratory was destroyed.

Instead of dying, however, Egghead had teleported away at the last second. He stayed in Manhattan, little more than a derelict. When he learned of Pym's mental breakdown and expulsion from the Avengers, and he set up an elaborate scheme to frame Pym for kidnapping and stealing weapons from a nuclear base. Forming the third Masters of Evil, Egghead pretended to "free" Pym from his trial, making the world believe him to be a criminal. Egghead forced Pym to work on Egghead's deepest wish, a cure for aging, but instead, Pym constructed a weapons device that allowed him to defeat the Masters of Evil just as the Avengers arrived to rescue him. Egghead attempted to shoot Pym in the back, but Hawkeye used an arrow to plug his gun, which misfired, killing Egghead.