The OceanGate Tragedy: A Co-Founder’s Perspective

On 18 June 2023, the small research submersible Titan imploded at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the wreck of the Titanic, instantly killing all five crew members, including the sub pilot, who also designed the sub and served as CEO of OceanGate, the company that owned the sub. His name was Stockton Rush, and he would become the villainous focal point of the global media frenzy surrounding the accident.

Stockton was my friend … and my co-founder at OceanGate. 

I have spent the past two years privately grieving the loss and grappling with survivor’s guilt, while also publicly fighting to provide a broader background to what very quickly became an obviously one-sided negative narrative.

I ultimately decided that the only way to get my entire story out without biased editing by the media was to write a book, so I spent almost ten months crafting a memoir of my time as co-founder and CEO of OceanGate. 

It truly was an exercise in “grieving through writing.”

Almost everyone has been respectful and offered me their condolences. However, they also have very strong opinions about what happened, mostly negative thoughts about Stockton, OceanGate, Titan, the Mission Specialist crew members, and even the Titanic expedition itself.

Of course, their opinions are based exclusively on what they read, heard, and saw in the mass media, without any additional independent research.

Unfortunately, the mass media’s narrative has been based primarily on the opinions of a handful of critics and naysayers, as well as only a few former OceanGate employees.

Even a cursory objective review would indicate that this cannot possibly be the entire story.

I can confirm that it most certainly is not.

I did not write this book to change people’s minds or opinions.

I am perfectly fine with people continuing to believe the negative things that have been said about my co-founder and my company. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Besides, Stockton was not a flawless individual, OceanGate was not a perfect venture, and Titan was not the pinnacle of technology innovation. I would never presume to argue otherwise.

However, the truth lies in the nuances behind the public narrative. This is where I hope to shine a light with my book and with my talks in front of live audiences.

However, this accident created ripple effects that continue to reverberate into several other industries, and it also exposed some valuable lessons learned for all businesses.

• Human Transportation Systems. In the 21st century, we have been living through an incredibly disruptive Technology Revolution, and right now it is reshaping all human transportation systems, from self-driving cars to air taxis to supersonic business jets to stratospheric balloons to suborbital spaceships and beyond. Like subs, these all share one critical common characteristic: at some point in the technology development cycle, by definition, a human must be put into the vehicle. This decision creates incredible risk, not just for the human in the vehicle but also for the company, its employees, its Board, and its shareholders. The key is to proactively manage that risk.
• Innovation, Standards, and Regulations. There is a saying that roughly states “business lags behind technology, and law lags behind business.” When innovators do what they do best, they push the bounds of what is known, what is possible, and what is accepted by their peers, by their competitors, and by society at large. Given all of the positive outcomes that innovation has provided for humanity, what is the right level of legal and regulatory control that should be put in place to ensure a reasonable amount of safety? When is the right time to determine a “standard” to which others must adhere? How can we determine what is and what is not possible according to current engineering principles and the laws of physics, when we are constantly rewriting both?
• Crisis Management and Communications. All businesses should have in place plans for managing crises and for communications during such crises. These could be situations contemplated as part of typical business operations or unexpected emergencies, such as natural disasters. They must be “gamed out” as much as possible and then revisited often to ensure they are current. It would not be too much to conduct occasional “drills,” just to get everyone comfortable with what could happen in extreme circumstances. In today’s fast-paced communications world, managing the social media narrative–which has absolutely no guardrails–is often even more important than managing relationships with journalists, who at least try to operate within their professional standards and with journalistic integrity.
• Corporate Governance and Succession Planning. I often say that “everyone wants to serve on a Board when everything is going well, but a company really needs its Board when everything is going wrong, which sadly is precisely when no one wants to serve on a Board.” In many ways, crises are tailor-made for Boards, which can provide critical oversight without being embroiled in day-to-day operations. Also, every company should have a clear succession plan (even if that means having a Board member step into a temporary management role), so that a leadership gap never materializes.

Perhaps these lessons are quite obvious to most people. However, there is nothing like a very public and tragic crisis to bring clarity and focus to every executive’s professional responsibilities. From first- and second-hand experience, I learned this the hard way.

There is so much more to this story than what the mass media has fed the public. It is not their fault, because they did not have much source material to work with. Regardless, the wholly one-sided negative narrative deserves a balanced conversation, so that people can form their opinions with much more context and background information.

The five crew members who perished in the accident, their families, and the greater OceanGate family all deserve to be heard. I will do what I can to give them a voice.