CEO of missing Titanic sub company once downplayed dangers of the voyage

The CEO on the missing Titan sub once bragged that his invention “shouldn’t take a lot of skill” to reach Titanic depths, using just an elevator-style button — and a videogame controller — but insisted that even if something goes haywire, “you’re still going to be safe.”

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — one of the five people onboard the still-missing submersible — had invited CBS News on an earlier doomed mission on Titan late last year.

“This is not your grandfather’s submersible,” Rush, 61, quipped to at-times terrified correspondent David Pogue in a clip that has since gone viral.

“We only have one button, that’s it,” he told the reporter as they squeezed inside the sub’s pod.

“It should be like an elevator — it shouldn’t take a lot of skill,” he said, pointing to the button that would take the vessel 2.4 miles below sea.

He then held up a vintage gray gaming device, saying with a smile: “We run this whole thing off this game controller.”

“C’mon!” an incredulous-sounding Pogue replied with nervous laughter.

Rush also bragged about using “off-the-shelf components” in the pioneering sub, including parts he got from Camper World. A small plastic bottle was shown as part of what Pogue called a “sort of” toilet.

Pogue bluntly told the CEO: “It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness.”

“I don’t know if I would use that description of it,” Rush replied defensively, maintaining that crucial parts like the “pressure vessel is not MacGyvered at all.”

“Everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go — you’re still going to be safe,” he said at the time.

Despite those reassurances, Pogue said ahead of his planned deep dive: “Not gonna lie — I was a little nervous.”

He then read a list of warnings that he had to sign — which said Titan was “an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma — or death.”

“Where do I sign?” Pogue asked sarcastically.

His initial planned Titanic dive was then scrapped due to large waves — and a test dive elsewhere failed just 37 feet underwater due to a malfunction of its floats.

Six days later, it tried again to dive to the Titanic wreckage — getting lost for around two-and-a-half hours.

Pogue did, however, eventually make it to see the wreckage of the Titanic, leaving in tears at least one of the explorers who said she’d waited 30 years to see it.

Ominously, the report ended by saying that “Stockton Rush plans to return to the wreck this coming summer” — the mission that got lost Sunday.