Even When They Fail, They Win: OceanGate and the Cult of the Super-Wealthy Innovator

Like many Americans, I was and remain enthralled by the coverage of the OceanGate Titan tragedy. Although death defying adventures are both above my paygrade and antithetical to my risk-averse temperament, the flood of articles and nonstop cable news segments on OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, his victims, and the Titan rescue and recovery efforts piqued my interest because they are palpable expressions of the lives we do and do not value.

As many have already observed, just two days before the Titan submersible imploded near Newfoundland, hundreds of Syrian, Palestinian, Pakistani, and Egyptian migrant workers drowned when their overloaded boat sank off the coast of Greece. The media’s scant coverage of a tale of maritime misery centered on desperate, impoverished, brown immigrant workers stood in sharp contrast to the round-the-clock coverage devoted to Titan’s wealthy occupants. And while the juxtaposition triggered sufficient public outrage that CNN was ultimately compelled to acknowledge the disparity on air, the brief acknowledgement did nothing to shift the balance of coverage.

To describe the story of the Titan as sensational would be an understatement. Because the submersible’s occupants met their end during a descent to the world’s most famous shipwreck, the Titan’s tale is characterized by the kind of morbid symmetry that drives a Hollywood disaster movie, if not an Aesop’s fable. The fact that the Titan tragedy offers a window onto the hubris of the super-rich further amplifies the story’s resonance, insofar as it is an expression of our decades-long fascination with wealthy people and their excesses.

But what is so intriguing about the lives of wealthy risk-takers? If the answer to this question is that the wealthy embody our collective aspirations, how do we explain the fact that we don’t just vicariously revel in the super-wealthy’s triumphs, we regularly delight in their (excessive) tragedies?

The Titan tragedy offers a window onto the hubris of the super-rich further amplifies the story’s resonance, insofar as it is an expression of our decades-long fascination with wealthy people and their excesses.

A key element of the story is that neoliberalism’s combined commitment to socialism for the wealthy and social Darwinism for the rest of us, has nurtured a collective hero worship of the super-wealthy and a related culture of resentment toward the allegedly undeserving “bad people” and “morons” the rest of us are forced to compete against for scarce resources. Because the super-wealthy are… super-wealthy, we tend to presume that they’re smarter and basically better than the rest of us—a disposition affirmed by corporate bailouts, interest rate hikes that advantage investors by spiking unemployment and depressing wages, and real and imagined wealthy people’s decades long outsized imprint on popular culture. The super-wealthy are not just rockstars (even when they’re not), but because they are presumed to have made all the right moves, they have attained a stature akin to real-life superheroes.

If the super-wealthy exemplify what we might all achieve if we have “the smarts” or are willing to “put in the work,” the Titan tragedy makes plain that their stumbles only affirm their vaunted place in our society.

The Titan tragedy is an expression of the unhealthy reverence we have for the corporate innovator, our real-life superheroes.

Indeed, OceanGate reminds us that even when the super-rich die doing foolhardy stuff, our government and media insist that we move heaven and earth to save them from their own recklessness. Worse yet, even though the super-wealthy’s colossal blunders announce their fallibility, their apparent humanity does little to weaken their grip on either our imagination or our politics. Yes, the fact that our presumed natural betters would either build an inherently flawed submersible deathtrap or be taken in by the haughty exuberance of a blue-blooded charlatan brings our cultural heroes down to earth. However, because these bold risk takers are our “job creators” and the innovators who will eventually find a profitable way to remove carbon from our atmosphere or, failing that, spirit us off to a freshly terraformed Mars, all we can do is indulge their flights of fancy or mock them when they fly too close to the sun.

As countless cathartically cruel memes about the Titan reveal, schadenfreude most certainly informs some of the collective interest in the poorly conceived submersible’s fate. OceanGate’s Titanic trips cost between $105,000 and $250,000 per-person—far more than the average annual household income in the United States. Likening Rush’s arrogant disregard for the risks before him to that of Titanic Captain Edward Smith, film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron has drawn parallels between the tragic ends of the Titanic and the Titan. But comparisons with the Titanic do the bad work of uncoupling the OceanGate CEO from his own historical moment—divorcing the man and his excesses from the troubled times that nurture(d) and permit(ted) them. Rush wasn’t just a bad actor. He was a symptom of a much deeper cultural and political problem that threatens us all, today.

The Titan tragedy is an expression of the unhealthy reverence we have for the corporate innovator, our real-life superheroes. Indeed, Rush’s hubris reflected much the same cost-cutting disregard for human life that characterized Boeing’s 737 MAX program— a reality that had likewise gone largely unrecognized until calamity struck. As was true of Ocean Gate, Boeing’s mismanagement of the MAX program was enabled by a language of “private sector innovation” that presumed corporate leaders were smarter and better than the rest us and should therefore be freed from the shackles of expert testimony and “stifling government oversight.”

Rush wasn’t just a bad actor. He was a symptom of a much deeper cultural and political problem that threatens us all

In contrast to the 737 MAX debacle, Rush’s arrogance led to the deaths of just five wealthy people (Rush among them). OceanGate certainly reveals the fallibility of the class that allegedly makes all the right decisions. Still, the evidence of the super-wealthy’s humanity only strengthens their sway over the popular imagination.

Our culture industry and, sadly, both major political parties insist that individual wealth will not only save us from precarity and alienation, but our personal wealth will allegedly pay dividends for our real and imagined communities. For most of us, the odds of acquiring super-wealth are only about as good as our chances of winning the Powerball. But by reminding us that the super-wealthy can make bad decisions that ultimately cost them their lives, the OceanGate tragedy offers hope, for some, that the rest of us mere mortals—who would never do something as risky as descending to the bottom of the ocean in an uncertified submersible—might escape a life of precarity by right-decisioning our way up the economic ladder.

The super-wealthy may be better than the rest of us, but they’re not gods. Our real-life superheroes are, thus, bound to fail from time to time.

Simply put, calamities like OceanGate make clear that flawed human beings can join the ranks of the super-wealthy. This, for what it’s worth, is much the same culture-work performed by the fiction that our Uber drivers and DoorDashers are up and coming entrepreneurs, rather than misclassified workers.

Superheroes take risks. The super-wealthy may be better than the rest of us, but they’re not gods. Our real-life superheroes are, thus, bound to fail from time to time. And as the popularity of the phrase “go big or go home” reveals, we have come to expect the super-wealthy to fail big—which is easy enough for them to do when taxpayers subsidize the risks.

The OceanGate disaster, former President Trump’s famous love for fast food, and even the much-anticipated Musk-Zuckerberg billionaire cage match would appear to close the divide between the super-wealthy and everyone else. But when these otherwise unrelatable superbeings have been humbled by either tragedy (in the case of the Titan) or contrived public spectacle (Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg) they remain very far removed from the rest of us.

Indeed, the contrast between the response to OceanGate and MAX 8 disasters tells the real story.

It took two crashes resulting in the deaths of nearly 350 passengers and crew engaged in mundane, commercial travel before the corporate media and regulators publicly acknowledged the inherent flaws in the 737 MAX’s design. By contrast, within a day of the disappearance of five wealthy adventurers, the U.S. and Canadian navies, assisted by several commercial deep-sea firms, mobilized a massive and very costly search and rescue operation. Moreover, even before formal confirmation of Titan’s implosion—unambiguous evidence of a fatal design flaw—coverage of the Titan quickly coalesced around well-documented concerns about Rush’s competence, leading to questions about government oversight over the submersible industry.

The real divide between the super-rich and the rest of us remains as wide as ever, despite their public failures and willingness to occasionally perform acts associated with the commoners.

Callousness toward victims of human tragedy is one of neoliberalism’s calling cards.

But does the fact that the lives of the super-wealthy matter more than the lives of everybody else mean we shouldn’t have empathy for wealthy victims of tragedy? Although the schadenfreude-fueled Titan memes may be expressions of discontent over the obvious class-skewed valuation of life in the United States, they are undeniably callous.

Of course, callousness toward victims of human tragedy is one of neoliberalism’s calling cards. Indeed, the regime’s liturgy proclaims an impartial invisible hand rewards and punishes the righteous and villainous, the smart and the dumb. If, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, far too many Americans insisted that New Orleanians invited disaster by stupidly choosing to live in a port-city, that—like all port-cities—is at, just above, or just below sea level, why would we expect an out-pouring of empathy for super-wealthy risk-takers? After all, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, much like Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 victims, were not taking on exceptional risks.

The bizarre details of this particular case, notwithstanding, the Titan tragedy fits squarely within the frame of a broader societal malaise that begs two important questions. First, how many tons of bricks have to fall on us before we realize that government regulation of private industries—from banking to commercial aviation—is both better for the public at large and far cheaper than socializing wealthy risktakers’ hubris? Second, what is the future of this nation if neoliberalism’s insistence that working people don Milk Bone underwear in a dog-eat-dog world deadens our capacity to empathize with even our neighbors? Progressives cannot pushback against this insanity if we accept the claim that organizing efforts that emphasize our common concerns constitute a betrayal of real and imagined particular interests. Frankly, drawing attention to our mutual interest is a tried-and-true vehicle for nurturing cross-group empathy and broad investment in narrower, but nonetheless important, group interests.

OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan is an expression of a long-legged political problem with a very large cultural footprint. The cult of the super-wealthy and the related insistence that (unregulated) “private sector innovation” is our salvation are a danger to us all. When left to their own devices, our real-life versions of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne can be every bit as dangerous as the fictional Gordon Gekko, Vilos Cohaagan, or Patrick Bateman.