A TYCOON who turned down tickets on the doomed Titan sub has revealed how Stockton Rush bragged it was "safer than crossing the street".
Jay Bloom shared texts from the OceanGate boss showing he and his son were offered a "last minute price" of £120,000 each – a discount on the usual £195,000 cost.
But businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, 19, took their spots and tragically died alongside Rush, Brit billionaire Hamish Harding, and French Navy veteran Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
A deep-sea robot sub found five major pieces of debris of Titan two miles beneath the surface on Thursday after a three-day frantic hunt for the vessel.
Businessman Mr Bloom, who has been photographed with Joe Biden, was set to go on the ill-fated dive with his son Sean – but raised safety concerns with Mr Rush.
He said: "I expressed safety concerns and Stockton told me: 'While there's obviously risk – it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving'.
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"He was absolutely convinced that it was safer than crossing the street.
"I am sure he really believed what he was saying. But he was very wrong. He passionately believed in what he was doing."
Mr Rush asked Mr Bloom and his son to go on the dive to the Titanic in May.
But both of the trips in May were postponed due to bad weather – and delayed until the doomed June 18 dive.
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Mr Bloom said: "I told him that due to scheduling we couldn’t go until next year.
"Our seats went to Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood, two of the other three who lost their lives on this excursion, the fifth being Hamish Harding.
"RIP Stockton and crew. As for Sean and I… we are going to take a minute to stop and smell the roses.
"Tomorrow is never promised. Make the most of today."
Texts show how Mr Rush repeatedly tried to reassure billionaire Mr Bloom about the safety of the sub.
Mr Bloom said his son was worried about the risks – but Mr Rush told him: "I'm happy to have a video call with him.
"Curious what the uninformed would say the danger is and whether it's real or imagined."
The OceanGate boss acknowledged the risk, writing: "While there's obviously risk it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving.
"There hasn't even been an injury in 35 years in non-military subs."
Titan vanished less than two hours into its descent to the Titanic wreckage on Sunday.
Search crews had been desperately looking for the vessel in the Atlantic after it lost communication with just 96 hours of life support.
The sub failed to resurface later that afternoon – with its final "ping" to mothership Polar Prince placing the sub directly above the ruins.
In a haunting interview last year, Mr Rush told how his main worry was that the sub – steered by a gaming controller – would get trapped under the water.
He also claimed there should be "limits" to safety precautions.
"You know, at some point, safety is just a pure waste," he told CBS.
"I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.
"I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules."
And in clip from last year shared on YouTube, Mr Rush can be heard saying he had "broken some of the rules" to make the sub.
He said the windows became "squeezed" because of the water pressure on descent, and a "warning" goes off if the vessel is going to "fail".
OceanGate confirmed Mr Rush and his four passengers had died on the sub after a "catastrophic" implosion.
One of the company's co-founders was doing a TV interview when he learned that debris had been discovered by rescue crews.
Guillermo Sohnlein, who founded OceanGate with Mr Rush in 2009, was speaking to a BBC journalist when he was told the update.
Appearing shocked and taken aback, he said: "I'm sorry, some what has been found?"
He told the BBC: 'I'm not sure [what the debris is] because I'm hearing this for the first time but I know that the protocol for lost comms is for the pilot to surface the sub.
"From the beginning I always thought that's probably what Stockton would have done.
"In which case it becomes very difficult to find the sub because the surface ship wouldn't have known it was coming up and wouldn't have known where to look.
"My biggest fear through this whole thing watching the operations unfold is that they're floating around on the surface and they're just very difficult to find."
Stockton Rush was absolutely convinced that it was safer than crossing the street
Rear Admiral John Mauger, of the US Coast Guard, said the debris was 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic – and "consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber".
The debris – including a landing frame and the tail cone – must now be raised 3,800m from the sea floor to uncover how the sub met its violent end.
Dr Dale Molé, the former director of undersea medicine and radiation health for the US Navy, revealed what would have happened during the crew's tragic final moments.
A violent implosion would have torn away the rear cover, landing frame, and ripped apart the sub's hull – crushing the passengers inside.
Molé told the Daily Mail: "It would have been so sudden, that they wouldn't even have known that there was a problem, or what happened to them.
"It's like being here one minute, and then the switch is turned off. You're alive one millisecond, and the next millisecond you're dead."
Hollywood director James Cameron – who has completed 33 dives to the wreck – believes the crew would have heard creaking in the sub before it imploded, killing all five on board.
"That’s quite a horrifying prospect," he told CNN.
He also drew comparisons to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 after OceanGate came under fire for crucial safety blunders.
The company faced a lawsuit over fears about the sub’s safety – and a former passenger revealed the vessel also went missing last year.
"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," Cameron told ABC.
Maritime historian Dr Sal Mercogliano, from North Carolina Campbell University, said the "unforgiving" ocean only needed to find a single "weak point" in the construction of the sub for it to implode.
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"Unfortunately, at that depth where you have pressure, that’s 380 times what you have at the earth’s surface," he said.
"That little deformity, that flaw, will lead to catastrophic results."
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