‘Titan: The OceanGate Disaster’: 5 Things We Learned

Stockton Rush, the late CEO of OceanGate who died along with four others when his Titan submersible imploded in June 2023, admired what he called the “big swingin’ dick” energy of fellow businessmen Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. He was obsessed with the Titanic. He had a habit of firing those who disagreed with his judgment. And he pushed forward with his fatal dive after multiple engineers and other experts warned him that his submersible was doomed to fail.

These are some of the details laid out in Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, the new Netflix documentary premiering June 11. Titan covers some of the same material as the Discovery documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, including extensive footage of the 2024 U.S. Coast Guard hearing investigating the tragedy. But it has an ace in the hole: David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations and a submersible pilot, who was fired after challenging Rush’s safety standards and later disclosed critical information under the Whistleblower Protection Act. Together with WIRED investigative journalist Mark Harris, who was also a consulting producer on Titan, Lochridge provides a barrage of damning factual heft in the new doc.

Here are five things we learned from Titan:

Disagreeing with Rush usually meant a speedy dismissal from OceanGate

Lochridge was shown the door when he insisted that Titan wasn’t ready for its big dive to see the wreckage of the Titanic. So was OceanGate director of engineering Tony Niessen. Titan paints a picture of a CEO who surrounded himself with yes men, many of them inexperienced and unqualified. Bonnie Carl, OceanGate’s former finance and human resources director, says in the film that at one point Stockton was ready to make her OceanGate’s new lead pilot. Her response in the film: “Are you nuts? I’m an accountant.”

Lochridge details Rush’s stubborn arrogance in the film: “He had every contact in the submersible industry telling him not to do this. But once you start down the path of doing it entirely by yourself, and you realize you’ve taken a wrong turn back at the beginning, then you have to admit that you were wrong.” Nobody interviewed in Titan suggests that Rush was capable of admitting that he was wrong.

Niessen is blunt in assessing his experience at OceanGate: “I worked for somebody who is probably a borderline clinical psychopath. How do you manage a person like that who owns the company?”

Emily Hasmmermeister, an OceanGate engineering assistant who Rush saw as a bright young face of the company, left when she realized Titan’s carbon-fiber hull was unstable. “Stockton was so set on getting to the Titanic that nothing that anybody said made much of a difference,” she says in the film. “I was not going to bolt anyone inside of that sub. And that was something that a lot of my coworkers at the time agreed on. None of them stayed with the company much longer.”    

Rush and his wife both came from blue-blood wealth

Rush comes across as someone who was quick with a “fuck you,” so it makes sense that he came from what might be called fuck-you money. “Both Stockton and his wife, Wendy, came from generational wealth,” Harris, the Wired reporter, says in the film. Stockton was a Princeton graduate, even if he didn’t have great grades. He traced his ancestry back to two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. In an ironic twist, Wendy Rush was the great-great granddaughter of two people who died on the Titanic: Isidor and Ida Strauss. Isidor was a co-owner of the Macy’s department store. “Stockton was definitely part of the one percent,” Harris says in the film.     

Rush liked to cut costs by using cheap materials

If you took a drink every time someone in Titan mentions carbon fiber you’d have a hard time driving home. The material is cheaper than, say, titanium or steel, and it’s also less expensive to transport. These factors made it an appealing option for Rush as he built the Titan. The engineers interviewed in the doc also claim it can be highly unstable. A carbon-fiber hull had never been used for as deep a dive as Rush was attempting.

In the film, Rob McCallum, who has led many expeditions to the Titanic wreckage as the co-founder of Eyos Expeditions and worked as a consultant for OceanGate, describes carbon fiber as “essentially string made from carbon. It’s coated with resin to hold it together.” He sums up the Titan structure thusly: “There was no way of knowing when it was going to fail. But it was a mathematical certainty that it would fail.”

Rush also liked to cut regulation corners

According to the documentary, Rush refused to have the Titan “classed,” or certified by a third party to meet industry standards. Lochridge claims that shortly after he insisted on a third-party inspection, and then wrote in a 2018 report that Titan wasn’t ready for the 3,800-meter dive to the Titanic wreckage, he was fired.

McCallum points out another key Rush workaround: He insisted on classifying his passengers as “mission specialists.” This categorization was intended to provide legal protection in case something went wrong. “It was just one of the steps that OceanGate took to make sure that they could work around U.S. legislation,” McCallum says in the film.       

The Titanic still has a strong grip on the world’s imagination

Rush called them “Titaniacs.” They’re the people who can’t get enough of anything related to the Titanic. A few were willing to fork over more than $100,000 for a seat on the Titan. In the film, Rush claims “there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet: Coca-Cola, God, and Titanic.” James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic surely has something to do with this; it grossed more than $2 billion worldwide, and prompted any number of moviegoers to proclaim themselves king (or queen) of the world.

But it’s not just the movie that brings people back to RMS Titanic, the British ocean liner which famously sank in 1912, killing approximately 1,500 people. The disaster was due largely to the kind of structural failure that would doom the Titan, a point Titan doesn’t fail to make.

“Even now, over 100 years after she sank, she just captures people,” McCallum says in the doc. Something about the combination of massive catastrophe and the dividing lines between social classes aboard the liner — First Class, Second Class, and Steerage, with survival rates declining according to economic position — has proved enthralling. Well before Titanic there was “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” a 1960 stage musical (and then a 1964 movie starring Debbie Reynolds) based on the life of Titanic survivor-turned-philanthropist Margaret Brown. Rush was hardly the first gung-ho Titanic enthusiast, though he may have been the most catastrophically arrogant.