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As shocking as it might sound, some folks were actually placing bets on what the end result of an ill-fated sub mission would be.
It's bad enough people on Facebook were reporting losing more friends since Donald Trump became President by posting sick memes about the sub leading up to Thursday's announcement that it had imploded and all on board lost their lives.
Users of Polymarket, a crypto-based futures trading platform, wagered over $300,000 on whether the “missing submarine” would “be found by June 23.”
“[W]hat stage of capitalism is investing in someone’s death,” one Twitter user asked, posting a screenshot showing Polymarket’s evolving spread on the submarine. The sentiment hit a nerve, and the post went viral, accruing over 9,000 retweets and over 150,000 likes. “Actually insane. Imagine making money off of if someone is gonna die or not,” another user wrote in a reply that was liked over 1,000 times. Others started criticizing Polymarket directly for opening up the sub market.
Our take is that it borders on bad taste, perhaps, but just as long as there were no bets on whether those on board would be found dead.
The five died in what the US Coast Guard says was likely a catastrophic implosion.
Parts of the submersible were found on Thursday, approximately 1,600ft (487m) from the bow of the Titanic wreck. It had disappeared on Sunday.
The men on board the sub included Stockton Rush, the 61-year-old CEO of OceanGate, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, and British businessman Hamish Harding, 58.
The fifth man on board, Paul-Henry Nargeolet, was a 77-year-old former French navy diver and renowned explorer.
Those familiar with the Titan sub felt it was not fit to carry passengers and should have undergone more rigorous testing.
James Cameron, the filmmaker who brought us the blockbuster "Titanic", knew in his heart early on that the Titanic-bound submersible probably had imploded and its occupants were all dead. Cameron has personally made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage.
“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion – a shock wave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the (mother) ship uses to track where the sub is,” Cameron said on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
- Jordan Bach, Gambling911.com
