OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who just might die at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in his own submarine, said he refused to hire older white men because they weren’t “inspirational.”
Rush made his comments in an interview in 2020 with Teledyne Marine.
“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub operators out there but they typically have gentleman who are ex-military submariners and you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush said.
https://youtu.be/YH0qRx5eYkY
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology but a 25-year-old you know who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” Rush said. “So we’ve really tried to to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”
“We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the, the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that. We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anybody can drive the sub,” he said.
Submersible technology is not “new” and hiring people because they are young, woke, and not white is apparently not exactly a recipe for success.
Because now Rush’s sub lost in the Atlantic Ocean.
It is estimated that the sub that Rush’s non-white workforce made only has enough air until sometime on Thursday. And unfortunately for Mr. Rush, he is on that craft.
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