King Princess, Descendent of Couple Who Died on Titanic, Weighs in On Titan Sub Disaster

King Princess is not impressed by wealthy people who take big risks. The singer (real name Mikaela Straus) is the great-great-granddaughter of Isodor and Idea Straus, who died when the Titanic sank in April 1912, and she has offered up an opinion about the Titan submersible, which killed five people when it imploded.

“I think there is a cycle of bajonga-jillionaires wanting to explore shit and then dying,” King Princess said on TikTok in a video that has since been taken down (via Entertainment Weekly). “Like, look at my fucking family, right? Who wants to take a boat across the ocean? That sounds terrible. But they did it because they had the money to, and they died. So now these people are like, ‘Oh, I have so much money. Oh my god, I just want to go to the inhabitable depths of the ocean.’ In a GameCube? No. Dead! Sorry.”

She continued, “Rich people are not exempt from making really stupid decisions, obviously. Why do rich people go to space? You don’t need to be there. You’re not a fucking scientist. Because they make terrible decisions, constantly. I hate this world… The sheer irony of these billionaires going down to visit the gravesite of other billionaires — amongst other people who were on the Titanic, there weren’t just billionaires — and then dying is so crazy to me.”

After a four-day search, officials confirmed yesterday that the submersible imploded on its way to visit the wreckage of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean. At a press conference, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said debris discovered earlier in the day by a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) on the seafloor was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.” Mauger said the families of the people onboard had been notified immediately.

The passengers included OceanGate’s founder and CEO Stockton Rush, British aviation businessman Hamish Harding, retired French Navy commander and Titanic expert ​​Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman. Like King Princess, Rush’s wife Wendy is also great-great-granddaughter of Straus, a businessman and Macy’s department store co-owner. The late Strauses were the wealthiest couple to die when the ship went down.

Over a hundred years later, the couple’s romantic tragedy has become one of the most famously told passenger accounts. When Ida learned her husband would not be able to join her in the lifeboat due to the “women and children first” policy, she refused to leave him and stayed onboard the doomed ship.

King Princess previously spoke to Rolling Stone about her connection with the Titanic in an interview in 2019.

“They were like, ‘We’re going to die together now,’” Straus says. “That’s a crazy thing to say; a crunch time decision, and very my vibe. They were very rich and Jewish, [but] I didn’t inherit any of this money. It was a little frustrating, but whatever.”

The Titan submersible first went missing Sunday morning when it lost contact with its support ship one hour and 45 minutes into a journey to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The exact cause and timing of the implosion are still being investigated. The craft’s location was consistent, officials said, with its last communication to the surface on Sunday morning. Although the debris was found near the bow of the Titanic, officials did not believe the sub had collided with the wreckage, but rather imploded in the water column above the sea floor. The ROV found the Titan’s nose cone, the front and aft ends of the “pressure hull,” and two “debris fields,” one larger, one smaller, that are still being analyzed.

From Rolling Stone US.