The Titanic Sub, The Rich, And The Super Rich

What's held my attention most in the story of the missing Titanic sub is the subplot involving wealth -- and it sounds like much of it is either inherited or of unidentifiable origin -- and a strange subcluture where a clique of wealthy people feed their own deep insecurities. Let's just start with the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush. According to this story,

In past media appearances, Rush appears calm, collegiate and telegenic. With silver hair and business-casual attire, he looks like he might be more at home on the golf course than thousands of feet under the sea. However, questions are now swirling about some of his decisions related to the submersible.

. . . Rush has described himself as having been "born into" wealth and then "grew it," according to a 2017 Bloomberg profile.

The grandson of an oil and gas magnate, he became a private investor alongside working in aviation, earning his pilot's license at the age of 19, the outlet reported.

In 2009 Rush founded OceanGate Expeditions, which remains a private company, with entrepreneur Guillermo Söhnlein, who's since left, according to Bloomberg. Per OceanGate marketing copy, the company is "dedicated to direct human exploration of the undersea world."

It turns out Mr Rush comes from precisely the same social stratum as Alissa Heinerscheid, the Bud Light executive who greenlighted their deal with Dylan Mulvaney: looks the look, talks the talk, rich as Croesus on granddad's money, skating through a corporate career, but on balance doesn't have a clue. Notice the gaseous corporate mission statement, "dedicated to direct human exploration of the undersea world." As far as anyone can tell, this means they take billionaire tourists on sub joyrides, but they give them the cachet of being sorta-kinda idealistic, not just conspicuous consumption.

As soon as the news of the missing sub broke, I couldn't help but think of another member of this small universe, Victor Vescovo,

an American private equity investor, retired naval officer, sub-orbital spaceflight participant, and undersea explorer. He is a co-founder and managing partner of private equity company Insight Equity Holdings. Vescovo achieved the Explorers Grand Slam by reaching the North and South Poles and climbing the Seven Summits, and he then visited the deepest points of all of Earth's five oceans during the Five Deeps Expedition of 2018–2019.

Like Stockton Rush, who has degrees from Princeton and UC Berkeley, and Ms Heinerscheid, who's from Groton and Harvard, Mr Vescovo's background includes the elite St Mark's School of Texas, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard Business School. This suggests his family was more than routinely prosperous, and so far, I've found that his father, from a prominent Tennessee family, was an entertainment executive, but beyond that, my information is sketchy. However, Vescovo himself has acknowledged that he's closely associated with Rush, OceanGate, and the Titanic submersible fiasco:

I have been asked to comment by many in media and other avenues, but I am sorry, I have no comment at this time. I have good friends onboard the submersible. https://t.co/3lcl0gA0L9

— Victor Vescovo (@VictorVescovo) June 19, 2023

Like Stockton Rush, Vescovo has his own submersible:

Working with Triton Submarines, Victor spent over four years developing a brand-new deep-sea submersible that would be up to this immense task. It needed to be capable of multiple descents into parts of the ocean where pressure levels can reach in excess of 1,000 times that at the surface. The result was DSV Limiting Factor – arguably the most advanced deep-sea crewed vessel in the world right now.

He deploys this submersible from its own "research vessel" mother ship, the Pressure Drop. Although media accounts of his career as an explorer are uniformly adulatory, it's hard to avoid a sense that the whole thing is an elaborate vanity project, and one of his main goals is to be given awards, like The Explorer Medal (2020) and the Captain Don Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration (2021). Here's an interview at Oceanographic:

The Five Deeps Expedition creator Victor Vescovo is no stranger to adventure. In 2017 he completed the ‘Explorers Grand Slam’, having climbed the highest peak of all seven of the world’s continents. This summer, he became the first person in history to have been to both the top of all the world’s continents and the bottom of all its oceans.

We caught up with this intrepid explorer on board the Five Deeps research vessel, Pressure Drop, to find out a little more about where his drive comes from and what his experiences were of heading into previously unexplored ocean areas.

Oceanographic Magazine (OM): You seem to have moved from the world of pure adventure into one of exploration. What prompted that shift?

Victor Vescovo (VV): Well one is a good transition to the other. I guess the transition came from adventuring and mountain climbing – that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do. To then be able to migrate into exploring the areas that nobody has ever been to before is extremely exciting.

So the implication is that he's evolved from rich-guy thrillseeking to something that's sorta-kinda more serious, but in effect, all he's doing is taking himself and assorted science-celebrities on submarine rides and getting awards for doing it. Left unexplained is how he pays for this -- do people pay him a quarter million a pop for the ride, as they do Stockton Rush, or is this entirely an eleemosynary effort? But maybe more to the point, where is the money for all this coming from in the first place?

Both Rush and Vescovo have "research vessels" (Rush's version was listed in 2005 with a reserve price of $1 million) that carry their ultra-submersibles around but seem in fact more like glorified yachts from which they launch ultra-expensive toys. At the same link,

Speaking to Sky News, former rear admiral Chris Parry warned that crafts like Titan 'are essentially kit cars, they're not normal submarines'.

'They're built in an experimental way, and this particular one is, shall we say, built from components you can get off the internet, from Amazon - they're very flimsy, very fragile, and you can't allow a lot to go wrong before you're in danger,' he said.

And at least in the case of Rush's Titanic sub, they can evade any requirements that they meet some sort of certification, although the whole field is so new that nobody seems to know what certification might involve. By the same token, how do you determine projects like Rush's or Vescovo's have any sort of academic or research-related merit?

But there's a bigger question here --why would anyone sign up for one of these sub rides, with Stanford Rush, Victor Vescovo, or any other like them?

A millionaire adventurer who was supposed to go on the Titan voyage said he backed out over fears that the company was “cutting too many corners.” Digital marketing tycoon Chris Brown told The Sun that he paid a deposit of $10,000 to join his friend Hamish Harding after the two decided to go on the voyage after having a “few beers.” Harding is currently on the missing submersible, but Brown changed his mind after learning how the Titan was built.

Well, that was a guy who decided to do something after a few beers but thought better of it the next day. But even among the quasi-seious "explorer" community there were serious doubts:

Veteran explorer Josh Gates, who hosts a TV series investigating myths and legends around the world, revealed Wednesday on Twitter that the missing OceanGate sub "did not perform well" when he went on a dive aboard the vessel himself.

. . . Gates, who hosts "Expedition Unknown" on Discovery, had gone with Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who is now among five missing along with the Titan sub, on a test dive before the vehicle's first visit to the Titanic site.

. . . "To those asking, #Titan did not perform well on my dive," Gates wrote. "Ultimately, I walked away from a huge opportunity to film Titanic due to my safety concerns w/ the @OceanGate platform."

. . . "There's more to the history and design of Titan that has not been made public – much of it concerning," Gates wrote.

. . . Like British businessman Hamish Harding, who is also aboard the missing sub, Gates is a member of the Explorers Club, a research-minded international society of adventurers, many of them very wealthy, including billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

So I went looking for the Explorers Club on the web and sure enough, the Explorers Club calls Victor Vescovo an "explorer's explorer" and has given him a medal. We're talking about a tight-knit, highly self-regarding clique of rich guys and wannabes who in fact seem to think well of themselves for engaging in expensive, pointless, and risky thrillseeking activity.

This in turn suggests to me that there are dupes and marks in this population. For instance, there's the Simpson's writer Mike Reiss, who'd been on fully three dives in the Titanic sub:

Reiss has gone on three different dives with OceanGate Expeditions, the company which owns Titan, and that they “almost always lost communication.”

“I got on the sub and at the back of my mind was ‘well, I may never get off this thing,’ that’s always with you,’ he said.

While Reiss allows that Titan is “a beautifully designed craft.”

“This is not to say this is a shoddy ship or anything, it’s just that this is all new technology and they’re learning it as they go along,” he said.

Here's cognitive dissonance at work. Reiss, who's presumably done quite well at the Simpsons and had the wherewithal to pay for three of Rush's joyrides, is unwilling to acknowledge that it was a shoddy ship, it's just that they're all pioneers. After all, Victor Vescovo got a medal, and Reiss probably deserves one, too.

I'm not sure if this is especially new in the world of the super rich. I look back at Hartley Dodge (1908-1930)

the heir to the Remington-Rockefeller fortune. He lived at Giralda Farms in Madison, New Jersey. He died in a car accident in France.

As I understand it, young Hartley was fascinated by airplanes and wanted to undertake flying as a hobby, but his mother forbade this as too risky. Instead, he took up fast cars, which his mother apparently felt was less of a risk, but he killed himself at it anyhow.

Now we have deep-sea submersibles that seem to serve the same purpose. I've got to wonder what sort of need this sort of activity satisfies in this sort of people.