Blood in the Water: How Concentrated Capital Turns CEOs into Serial Killers

The Submarine that Couldn’t

There’s a moment (one of many) near the end of Netflix’s Titan documentary that makes you roll your eyes with expectant nausea as a profound statement regarding the causes of the Titan disaster is uncovered. After documenting how Stockton Rush fired whistleblowers and bullied engineers into silence, the filmmakers serve up a severely underwhelming conclusion: it was all about “culture”. Specifically, “tech bro culture and trying to move fast and break things” OceanGate’s Titan Submersible Implosion Documentary: Release Date, Trailer, News - Netflix Tudum.

Hmmmm… yeah. Nah.

This wasn’t about “Big Swingin’ Dicks” (a phrase Rush was apparently a fan of) vibes gone wrong. This was about what happens when obscene wealth conflates and individual’s point-of-view on the world to the point they basically believe that are not subject to the same natural laws that govern the rest of us. Netflix shows us Rush’s “relentless quest to bring oceanic exploration to the luxury tourism industry” OceanGate’s Titan Submersible Implosion Documentary: Release Date, Trailer, News - Netflix Tudum and how the disaster was “due entirely to the CEO, who would fire those who brought him safety concerns and lash out at his own experts.” Titan: The OceanGate Disaster review: Netflix doc damns CEO They’re showing us capitalism’s inevitable endgame and a story being played out more frequently as wealth is conflated with intellect.

Five people are dead because a man with generational wealth (that goes as far back as US constitutional framers) believed his bank account made him smarter than physics. They’re dead because under our currently ailing pseudo post-capitalist economic system, the ruling class has become so insulated from material reality that they think money can negotiate with thermodynamics. And Rush? He’s not an aberration. He’s the perfect specimen of his class.

CEOs as Serial Killers

The story of the Titan implosion is as predictable as it is tragic. It’s the same story we see as hyper-capital endeavours bludgeon people to death under their weight of their own complexity and hubris. Whether it’s planes falling from the sky or pension funds evaporating overnight, the pattern never changes: the ruling class gamble, and the proles pay the price.

Take Boeing. After merging with McDonnell–Douglas in 1997, they replaced engineers in top management with business executives. The Boeing 737 MAX: Lessons for Engineering Ethics - PMC The new CEO bragged: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” Why Boeing’s Problems with the 737 MAX Began More Than 25 Years Ago | Working Knowledge When engineers raised safety concerns about the 737 Max, management ignored them. Result? 346 dead.

Or the 2008 financial crisis. Wall Street bundled garbage mortgages, bet against them, then acted shocked when it collapsed. Who got bailed out? The banks. Who lost their homes? Working families. Same with Silicon Valley Bank. Regulators knew years before its collapse that it was vulnerable. Federal Regulators Ignored Warning Signs at Silicon Valley Bank Years Before Its Collapse They did nothing because protecting capital trumps protecting people.

Then there’s fossil fuels, capitalism’s long game. Exxon knew about climate change in the 1970s but spent decades funding denial while coastal cities started drowning. BP’s Deepwater Horizon killed 11 workers and poisoned the Gulf because safety equipment cost too much. Shell dumps oil in Nigeria, Chevron poisons Ecuador, coal companies blow up Appalachian mountains—all while their executives buy bunkers in New Zealand for when the climate collapses. They literally plan to profit from the apocalypse they’re creating.

The formula never changes: concentrate enough capital, and those controlling it believe they’re gods. They think wealth makes them immune to physics, biology, mathematics, or any law the rest of us must follow. And when their delusions collide with reality, who pays? Not them. Never them. It’s always us—the people in the planes, the cancer patients near refineries, the workers whose pensions vanish, the families drinking poisoned water.

The Base and Superstructure of Billionaire Delusion

So how on earth does this keep happening?

Simple: extreme wealth creates its own reality.

When you’re worth billions (I can only assume), there is a ubiquitous and perennial financial incentive for those surround you to agree. The Titan documentary nails this: “It was a cult of personality. If you went against him, you were likely to be out.” The Truth About the Titan Sub Disaster: ‘Baffling’ Decisions, Their Final Moments and a ‘Smoking Gun’ (Exclusive) But it wasn’t Rush’s personality—it was his capital. Those that left due to conscious were not support but regulators or investigative agencies and those that stayed were terrified to do anything for fear of not just financial reprisal, but the very real threat of destruction of their lives.

Silicon Valley and the Tech-Bro ruling class have perfected this system. For every engineer who refuses to sign off on a death trap, there’s a desperate grad with student loans who’ll do it. Fire the dissenters, hire the desperate—Marx called this the reserve army of labour and modern technological and industrial pursuits have turned into a well-honed, exploitative art form.

Meanwhile, the entire superstructure of society protects these delusions. Media breathlessly reports every insane billionaire tourettes outburst as inovation. Believing, despite all evidence to the contrary that only the rich and wealthy with their big-business-brains can save us from the waste, fraud and abuse of our government institutions. Lawmakers and regulators either hope for private sector jobs or genuinely believe the market will sort itself out.

This creates a feedback loop: billionaire says something insane, employees agree, media amplifies it, regulators nod along, and suddenly “let’s make a submarine out of camping equipment” becomes a legitimate business plan. When everyone you meet tells you you’re a genius, when every institution defers to your wealth, why wouldn’t you think you’ve transcended the rules that govern lesser mortals?

The System As Designed

Marx saw this coming 150 years ago. As capitalism matures, the rate of profit naturally falls—there’s only so much value you can squeeze from traditional production. So capital gets desperate, increasingly reckless in its hunt for returns. Cut safety protocols, ignore engineers, fake test results, gamble with customer deposits—anything to juice those quarterly numbers. The contradiction is stark: we all depend on socialised systems (aviation, medicine, banking) but they’re owned and operated for private profit (thanks to the genius of neuo-liberalism. When competition demands ever-higher returns, corner-cutting becomes mandatory. Boeing didn’t decide to kill people; the market demanded they reduce costs or lose to Airbus.

The state won’t save us because the state exists to protect capital. Every regulatory agency is captured, every politician is bought, every law has a loophole for the sufficiently wealthy. When these disasters happen, we get theatre: congressional hearings, perp walks, maybe a few executives go to minimum-security prison. But the system that created them? Untouched.

The Revolutionary Necessity

These aren’t glitches or bad apples. This is capitalism in its purest form: a machine that turns blood into profit. And ruling class that do not add value. They seek only to extract it for their own egos and delusions. Every dead passenger, every bankrupted family, every poisoned community—just collateral damage in the endless pursuit of accumulation. And who pays? Always the working class.

We die in the planes, lose our homes in the crashes, drink the poisoned water. Meanwhile capital gets bailed out, protected, subsidized. Boeing kept its contracts while families buried their dead. Banks got $700 billion in 2008 while workers got foreclosure notices. Losses are socialised, profits privatised and the worker is blamed for desiring a living wage.

This is no longer about reform. The ostensible reformers are a captured class. They exist only for the perpetuation of the status quo. What you think is a democracy and freedom is no longer the case. You can’t regulate away capitalism’s drive to extract maximum value at minimum cost. The choice is stark: socialism or barbarism. We MUST wake up. We MUST develop a class-consciousness. We MUST understand that although things are liveable now for some, the middle class will continue to be eroded.

Agitate relentlessly. Refuse to forget. The billionaires conflate wealth with divine understanding. They are wrong. Modern CEOs and billionaires are nothing more than the fortunate benefactors of history and a broken economic framework. Without our labour, they are nothing. It’s time we fucking acted like it.

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