Stanley made the accusation to author Matthew Gavin Frank for the book “Submersed: Wonder, Obsession and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines,” calling Titan “a mousetrap for billionaires” and saying Rush’s ego was “so big, he was willing to die and kill to be pivotal to the character of this story.”
Twelve days after the June 18, 2023 implosion, Stanley messaged Frank to say Rush had known exactly how the dive would end. His theory: Rush wanted to die at the wreck so he would become part of “Titanic mythology,” and the four others were part of that legacy too. “He was in fact a good engineer,” Stanley said.
“He set a new standard for going out with a bang.” He’d floated a version of this in 2023, telling 60 Minutes Australia that Rush was “the last person to murder two billionaires at once and have them pay for the privilege.”
Stanley isn’t a stranger to the sub. In 2019 he joined Rush on a test dive in the Bahamas and heard gunshot-like sounds every few minutes during the descent.
The day after, he emailed Rush that the noise meant an area of the hull “is breaking down/getting spongy” and begged him to stop diving to the Titanic until it was checked. Rush told him to keep his opinions to himself: “I value your experience and advice on many things, but not on the assessment of carbon fiber pressure hulls.”
The accusation is one friend’s reading. No government report, court, or forensic review concluded Rush intended to die or built the sub as a weapon.
The US Coast Guard’s investigation, released in August 2025, called the disaster preventable and traced it to OceanGate skipping established engineering practice, with a carbon-fiber hull that delaminated and buckled at about 11,000 feet.
Rush, 61, was piloting. He died alongside British adventurer Hamish Harding, 58, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, his 19-year-old son Suleman, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
What the record does show is a man who was warned and didn’t listen. A Boeing engineer told him in 2018 he had “no safety margin.” Former marine operations director David Lochridge pushed for the hull to be scanned and classed, and was fired and sued.
Titan had already reached the wreck on roughly a dozen dives before it failed, which is hard to square with a craft built to implode on a chosen day. The Coast Guard’s word for Rush’s role was negligence, serious enough that he likely would have faced a criminal referral had he survived.
