Karl Stanley, a friend of late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, isnt surprised the Titan submersible fatally imploded last month. A prior passenger on the doomed vessel, Stanley told 60 Minutes Australia that Rush definitely knew it was going to end like this.

He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with, Stanley told the outlet in an interview published Sunday . And who was the last person to murder two billionaires, at once, and have them pay for the privilege?

I think Stockton was designing a mousetrap for billionaires , Stanley added.

Rush brought four customers with him on the fatal 2.5-mile dive to visit the RMS Titanic wreckage, only to lose communication within hours of descending. Debris from the imploded sub was recovered days later .

Stanley was one of several people who warned Rush about the dangers of his shoddy construction. Titan was the only deep-sea sub with a hull made of carbon fiber , which while light is incapable of reliably withstanding atmospheric pressures of the deep sea.

Stanley, a submersibles expert and deep sea explorer himself, experienced this firsthand during a Titan test dive in the Bahamas in 2019. He said Sunday there were loud, gunshot-like noises every three to four minutes that he said were coming from the carbon fiber tube breaking apart.