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I just can’t understand why ANYONE with that much money wouldn’t be a little more careful about where they choose to take risk. A little investigation on their part would have turned up the previous safety concerns.
The 19-year-old reportedly told family he was terrified. It was Father's Day and his father is very interested in the Titanic, so he went anyway. He was just trying to impress and relate to his father.
The 19 year old is the one I kind of feel sorry for, but he still made the decision to go down there and it's a decision I really don't think I would've made myself. But who knows 🤷
One thing you can't buy with money is intelligence.
Except that you can: you hire intelligence. He paid people to build it and fired them when they weren't comfortable with the design and had safety concerns. Lol
I don't know anything about this guy, so take my pet theories with a pinch of salt, but...
In my experience, people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs are often simply bad at perceiving risk. They start out with a certain hubris that is a product of this deficiency in assessing risk. Many of them will be taken down by this, but others will get lucky.
When they get lucky, these people tend not to notice the element of luck but ascribe their success wholly to their smarts and hard work. This can lead to an inflated sense of how good one's judgement is.
It can also lead to a lack of humility. It takes both good judgement and humility to know when to defer to someone else's judgement. These people had hubris to start with, and their success can compound this to the point where they consider themselves the best judge of everything. Then they stop listening to people who may know better than them.
They also have the power to surround themselves with yes-men, so they are challenged less and less as time goes on.
Maybe this guy wasn't like that, but his comments about safety measures being a waste, his disregard for safety standards in constructing this submarine, and the way he fired the employee who complained that the sub was unsafe, suggest he may have been in this mold.
Survivor bias at its finest.
Regarding your first point, I think that the toxic culture around start-ups and such even incentivises people to be bad at gauging risk. Each funding round means making more outlandish promises, as investors keep expecting you to grow how fast you're growing; do more, with less.
I have a few disabilities that mean that I'm often unable to do all the basic things a person needs. I've got very good at gauging risk and balancing my resources accordingly, but there have been times where things are just too stacked up against me and there's little chance of a win outcome, but also no space for losing. I'm talking situations like being miserable from being bed bound for a day or so and needing to make it over to my computer to hang out with friends, somehow obtaining food and water en route. In a weird way, I sympathise with the CEO, because I know how desperation distorts perspective.
The worst decisions are made when I have decided to try to do the big difficult thing (food, then computer), but I realise part way through that I don't have the capacity to do it all. The smart thing would be to adjust my goals and get food and medication, and retreat to bed. However, that outcome doesn't feel worth the painful ordeal of leaving bed in the first place. Had I known it would've ended like this, I wouldn't have attempted it, but I was rolling the dice.
Usually, my original decision to leave bed is good; I understand relative risk levels and I'm aware of the chance of failure and how to mitigate the fallout. The point of failure isn't actually the point where the submarine explodes, or the sad cripple who pushed herself too far has to sleep on the floor because she can't make it to her computer or her desk. The failure point is when you know that unless you alter your goal, you're fucked.
If this CEO had made the right choices, his company probably would've died. He made negligent choices in building the submarine because he couldn't afford to do it properly (and thus shouldn't have even attempted this silly ordeal), but he had already spent millions of other people's money, trying to fulfill impossible promises. I wonder at what point he realised his stated goals were impossible, and that he was just desperately stringing along investors hoping for a hail Mary stunt that could buy him more time. I wonder if it was always the plan for him to go on the sub, or whether his presence there was an attempt to assuage anxious ticketholders. I wonder if he had any sense to fear for his life or if his only fears were for his company.
Absolutely fuck this guy. His pointless folly has killed people. The people who bought tickets were perhaps fools too, just in a different way, but I also believe they were at least partly scammed by the CEO guy making impossible promises. Fucking rich people and their vanity projects. And yet, I feel like he was also a victim of the toxic system that made him, in a way. Ugh, I have a lot of complex feelings about this whole thing.
Totally agree, this is great insight. Political leaders also sometimes do this.
After a certain point, you consider the risks and have to make a decision weighing the pros and cons of the voyage. Yes, there's a very real chance of death if things go wrong, but there's also a chance for a life changing experience if things go right. For some people, the risk and adventure of it all is entirely the point of life.
As for the money, the $250K is a rounding error to a billionaire. Someone with a net worth of $1B spending $250K is similar to someone with a net worth of $10K spending $2.50 (e.g. about the same as a bottle of soda from a gas station).
I think a lot of people on here would be willing to take a trip to Mars if it came with a 1% chance of death and a 99% chance of the most memorable experience of your life. You'd probably get a lot of people willing to do the same if the chance of death were increased to 10% too, though obviously, many would view the 10% as too risky. If you increased the chance of death to 50% or higher, most people would decline, but there are a number of thrill seeker / adventurer type of personalities out there that would jump on the offer in a heartbeat. It all comes down to your personal risk/reward tradeoff.
I guess the CEO of OceanGate joining them for the dive would have given them a false sense of comfort.
Interestingly, that same CEO mentioned that the Titan submersible was already showing signs of cyclical fatigue back in 2020:
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/oceangate-raises-18m-build-bigger-submersible-fleet-get-set-titanic-trips/
It would be fascinating if we could get an aircraft disaster style analysis but I don't know if they would do so for marine accidents.
I wonder if they have a blackbox built in. doubt they have since they've skip so many standard.
They didn't even have a locator beacon, and the sub ran Windows for some insane reason.
I would be amazed if they had a black box.
I think CEO of the company being on the board made people think all those regulations were just unnecessary red tape. In fact that was what the CEO thinks.
BTW: kind of unrelated, but I find it crazy that CEO's wife lost her parents to Titanic, and now she also lost her husband to it.
Well not her parents, her great, great grandparents
same reason why people will climb mount Everrest.
Those people are idiots too
Honestly Everest is way more tested and predictable than the Titan. This is like being Laika but for no gain.
AFAIK they had already been down to the titanic multiple times, so I can see people thinking it was safe regardless.
Basically gambler's fallacy. The roulette wheel has come up red every time so far so surely the next roll will be red again.
I assume they got more arrogant the richer they are. A lot of things that requires thinking and effort were done for them by throwing money around, so why not this dodgy sub?