Billionaire pressured reluctant son to join him 2 miles under the sea in libertarian bro’s janky death trap

This is very sad:

In the days before the Titan vessel went into the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said in an interview Thursday.

Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified” about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard OceanGate’s 22-foot submersible because the trip fell over Father’s Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, according to Azmeh.

“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath … It’s been crippling, to be honest,” Azmeh said in a phone interview from the home in Amsterdam she shares with her husband, Jonathan.

She was devastated on Thursday when OceanGate, the company behind the Titan expedition, confirmed that all five passengers aboard were presumed dead. The U.S. Coast Guard said that debris in the search area was consistent with a “catastrophic implosion.”

If fully-informed older rich people with a death wish want to pay a ton of money to go to the bottom of the ocean in an experimental carbon fiber tube, one can argue it’s ultimately their lives. But it would be nice if they at least left their children out of it.