I wouldn't go so far as say [Vaughn] was better than Hackman. These days, with the advent of more serious comic book films, it has become trendier to criticize Hackman's over-the-top performance in a movie that was otherwise done seriously, (verisimilitude, according to director Richard Donner), but he gave the role a little color that was absent in the character of Ross Webster. Still, Hackman's performance is "dated". Or I should say, the interpretation of the character is dated.
I'm talking about the conceptions of the characters, not the performances. Hackman did a great job, but the character of Lex as conceived in the films was dreadfully lame, just some weird guy who lived underground, had no organization beyond one idiot and one sexpot, and was bizarrely obsessed with real estate. He didn't really come across as a credible threat for Superman; how could these three doofuses pull off all the megacrimes they committed in the film? But Ross Webster was a successful, evil multigajillionaire with a huge, global organization and immense resources at his beck and call, so it was far more credible that he could manage to be a serious threat to Superman. And as I said, he was a prototype of sorts for the corporate magnate character Luthor himself became in the comics a few years later. So Webster, as a character, was more successful at being Lex Luthor than Luthor himself was.
