Popular YouTuber MrBeast has claimed that he turned down a trip on the Titanic submarine that imploded earlier this week.
Five people died on an undersea expedition to visit the wreckage of the Titanic, as part of an expensive tourist attraction run by OceanGate Expeditions.
Among those to die in the “catastrophic” incident were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.
MrBeast, real name James Donaldson, is the world’s most subscribed individual YouTuber, and the owner of the second-most-subscribed channel overall.
On Twitter, he wrote: “I was invited earlier this month to ride the Titanic submarine, I said no. Kind of scary that I could have been on it.”
Alongside this, he shared a screenshot of what appears to be a message sent to his phone, which reads: “Also, I’m going to the Titanic in a submarine late this month. The team would be stoked to have you along.”
You can read a full timeline of the Titan submersible disaster here.
After word of the tragedy broke on Thursday (22 June), Titanic director James Cameron shared his reaction to the news in a TV interview.
The Canadian filmmaker and avid sea tourist told ABC News: “Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub. A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified and so on.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result.”
Cameron has made dozens of trips himself to the site of the Titanic shipwreck. In 2012, he became the first person to complete a solo descent to the deepest part of the Earth’s ocean, the Mariana Trench.
“For us, a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal,” he continued.
