OceanGate CEO didn’t want veterans: ‘they weren’t inspiring’

OceanGate ruled out white veterans for not being ‘inspiring’

In mid-June 2023, the top executive of the company operating the tourist submersible to the Titanic wreck explained, in a video circulated after the incident, that he did not want to hire “white guys in their 50s” with experience because they did not seem “inspiring” to him. Shortly afterward, the craft disappeared on the route to the wreck with five people aboard, and its occupants died. The coincidence between the staffing rhetoric and the outcome is what has fueled the conversation.

The hiring criterion that turned the case around

The video captures the executive’s explanation of his staffing policy: he ruled out veteran engineers — men, white, around fifty, with decades of experience — because they did not fit the profile the company wanted to project. He favored “innovative” and young profiles. The phrase, placed next to the outcome, has been read as a confession.

There are two ways to interpret it. One camp argues it is age and origin discrimination disguised as modernity. Another, more prosaic, reduces everything to money: a specialist with thirty years of experience commands far more than a recent graduate, and the staffing policy would be a cost cut with good press. Nothing new under the sun.

What was OceanGate, and what was inside the submersible?

OceanGate operated a submersible to take wealthy tourists to view the Titanic wreck. The craft worked more simply than its price suggests: it dropped ballast to return to the surface. As detailed in the discussion, it carried seven ballast weights, and releasing only some would have allowed it to ascend more slowly; if it did not surface, the hypotheses entertained by the more technical observers are a leak or a jam at the bottom.

The engineering details provided in some messages are the most solid material in the case. At those depths, air is not used as a float because it compresses until it is almost nothing — 4,000 liters of air equal the size of a fist down there — and diesel is used instead, which is not compressible and weighs less than water. The real problem, another notes, was not oxygen but removing CO2. And ventilation simply did not exist. In a visit a YouTuber recorded years earlier, the craft can be seen approaching the wreck’s stairs in a disturbing way.

The two readings of the disaster

Much of the analysis blames the staffing criterion: if people are hired by quota rather than experience in a lethal environment, the margin for error narrows until it disappears. The veteran argument rests on a specific name: among the occupants was a former military officer with a background in underwater expeditions, exactly the profile the company said it did not want.

The opposite reading dismantles the thesis of the inexperienced crew. The top executive himself piloted the craft, a white man in his fifties with years of dives behind him, and another veteran traveled beside him. It is hard to argue the problem was a young, inexperienced team when the boss was making the decisions. There the diversity narrative loses force.

Rothschild, Mr. Pool and other unverified coincidences

As in any incident with wealthy victims, theories appeared. It circulated that David de Rothschild was part of the submersible company’s board, and with that came the usual litany about who pulls the strings. Another current highlighted an at least curious coincidence: the craft departed three years after a notable date, June 16, 2020, associated with a fictional character. And another message collected Donald Trump Jr.’s doubts, who saw the case as “weird” from start to finish.

It should be said clearly: none of those connections is supported by evidence. They are coincidences and suspicions, not data. Technically, the case remains open on several fronts.

The outcome and the prize no one wants

All five occupants died. With that point settled, the conversation turned toward score-settling in black-humor key — the “Darwin Award” appeared several times — and toward the uncomfortable question: how much of what peine was avoidable? The dominant answer is that a project like this should have passed through hands with scars, not through a presentable résumé.

And there it stays, without a closed technical verdict on exactly what failed. One sector suspects that the rush to innovate bypassed controls; another responds that discussing causes without a forensic report is science fiction.

What is striking is not that a company preferred cheap staff. It is that the man defending it ended up inside, nearing 77, in the same contraption from which he had kicked out the veterans.