HMS Titanic, the watery gravesite of early 20th century plutocrats such as John Jacob Astor IV, Isidor Straus, Benjamin Guggenheim, Walter Douglas, and other wealthy elitists, is finding a new life as a tourist attraction for 21st century plutocrats shelling out sums upward of $250,000 to visit the wreck several miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, the New York Times reports.
"For those who think it's expensive, it's a fraction of the cost of going to space and it's very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,. And the folks who don't like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that's the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need," said Stockton Rush, President of OceanGate Expeditions, the company running the deep sea tours for wealthy assholes to gawk at the site where past generations of wealthy assholes (and over a thousand impoverished immigrants) perished.