Stockton Rush’s Name Deserves to Live in Infamy

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 07, 2025

 

As a rule, I am a reflexive champion of the great American eccentric. With the possible exception of Great Britain during the Victorian era, the United States has exhibited a facility for the production and protection of idiosyncratic prodigies that is unmatched in the history of the world. In our schools, we focus on the great statesmen of our history, but, to understand America properly, one must spend equal time on the innovators, the dissenters, and the oddballs who never got close to political power. Without the Philo Farnsworths, Thomas Edisons, Nikola Teslas, Elon Musks, Henry Fords, and Robert Fultons, this country would look profoundly different. At the height of the woke panic, I took to delivering a speech titled, “The Importance of Weirdos,” in which I made the case that the advent of “cancel culture” was not merely an inconvenience but a recipe for national suicide. My case was simple: That, if, in a fit of puritan monomania, we chose to exile anyone who betrayed peculiar habits, unpleasant views, unenviable personal lives, or unorthodox commercial ambitions, we would end up trading the misfits who make a difference for the bureaucrats who do nothing of use. Usually, I concluded, the proposition was package deal: The same oddball instincts that led Jack Parsons to pioneer modern rocketry also attracted him to the occult.

 

So when I, of all people, say that Stockton Rush’s name deserves to live in perpetual infamy, you know that his record must have been pretty darn bad.

 

Stockton Rush, for those who are unaware, was the dilettante behind the disastrous Titan submersible, which imploded on June 18, 2023, killing everybody on board. Evidently, Rush conceived of himself as a great explorer, entrepreneur, and contrarian — as a Benjamin Franklin of the modern age. In truth, he was none of those things. He had the affect, but not the language; the drive, but not the diligence; the habits, but not the understanding. Where obsessives seek perfection, Rush sought dispatch. Where visionaries discern novelty, Rush found shortcuts. Where trailblazers display bravery, Rush was downright dumb. In the pursuit of greatness, there can be room for intolerance, insensitivity, and even unalloyed rudeness. For such an approach to be justified, however, one has to be right — not simply in charge. Stockton Rush was in charge, but he was not right. His conflation of the two led to the death of four innocent people.

 

The Coast Guard’s report on Rush’s exploits ought to be mandatory reading for all aspiring entrepreneurs. There is a thin line between passion and rashness, and, at every possible juncture, Stockton Rush walked on the wrong side of it. He hired a team of engineers, and then “made all engineering decisions independently.” He referred to a “director of safety” in his materials, but never hired one. He sidelined his board of directors so that they could ask no difficult questions. Having sought out advice from Boeing, he ignored the parts that were inconvenient to his goals. Worst of all, he mistook marketing for reality, and promises for success. Instead of relentlessly seeking to create a submersible that actually worked, Rush sought to create a submersible that looked as if it worked. Per his former engineering director, Rush’s response to the news that his deep-sea vehicle had a large crack in its hull was to make clear that “he wanted to maintain credibility with the public,” to ensure that “the media saw that OceanGate was still in operation” when it was not, and, eventually, to create “a false impression of the submersible’s proven reliability and safety” by pretending that it had undergone more tests and more dives than it actually had.

 

Great rebels beat the establishment at its own game. Rush simply opted out. He submitted his craft to no inspections, operated outside of all government oversight, and, where necessary, bent language to his own purposes. Thus, simultaneously, did he claim that his invention was revolutionizing the industry and that it was a mere experimental vessel. Thus, simultaneously, did he boast that he was opening up the Titan to everyday travelers and that all of his customers were “mission specialists” whose subsea expertise was a necessary part of the journey. His wasn’t a revolutionizing of the realm but a circumvention of it. All in all, Stockton Rush was to the great American inventor what Milli Vanilli was to the music industry — an interloper who didn’t so much make everyone else look bad as confirm that he was operating, and lethally failing, in a completely different universe.