Going Down with the Ship

On June 18th, 2023, a submersible called the Titan made its final trip down to the wreckage of Titanic (which is about 3800 meters beneath sea level). It was carrying five passengers, some of which had apparently paid serious money to be part of the voyage (tickets were reportedly 250k a pop). Somewhere along the way, something went wrong, the vessel imploded and the people on board died.

So why are we talking about this? Because the Titan submarine was the brainchild of an entitled silver spooned second-generation job creator known as Stockton Rush. He founded OceanGate which was the company that designed, built and operated the Titan. Funnily enough if you click through and look at Stockton’s wikipedia page, you’ll see that he was originally employed by McDonnell Douglas (the entity Boeing eventually merged with which now produces an epic fail line of space ships and airplanes) as a Test Flight Engineer.

But don’t be fooled, he wasn’t an engineer and he was never an engineer regardless of what his title indicated. He graduated from Princeton with an MBA. Like many kids he dreamed of growing up to become an astronaut, aviator or something along those lines. However unlike the rest of us his family had enough means for him to make something like that happen for himself regardless of how qualified he was or was not. So eventually Stockton starts a company where he builds his own sub. Then decides that he’ll charge rich assholes just like him 250k a pop to catch rides down to see the wreckage of the Titantic. Which on the surface, actually sounds really fucking cool if I’m being honest. But of course there is more to this tale than meets the eye.

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