OceanGate CEO missing in Titanic sub grew up in prominent S.F. family

June 21, 2023Updated: June 21, 2023 1:13 p.m.

OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush speaks in front of a projected image of the wreckage of the ocean liner Andrea Doria. Rescuers in a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean are racing against time to find a missing submersible before the oxygen supply runs out for five people, including Rush.
Bill Sikes/Associated Press

The captain of a submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic on Sunday while searching for the wreckage of the Titanic is the grandson of a prominent San Franciscan for whom Davies Symphony Hall is named, according to his 1986 wedding announcement in the New York Times.

Stockton Rush Jr., 61, was described in the announcement as an aerospace engineer who graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and later, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, from which he earned a master’s degree in 1989, his LinkedIn profile says.

His maternal grandfather, Ralph K. Davies, was a philanthropist and chairman of the shipping company American President Lines, the wedding announcement said. Davies’ wife, Louise Davies, was a performing arts benefactor who donated $4 million to the construction of Davies Symphony Hall, which opened in 1980 near the War Memorial Building and the Opera House on Van Ness Avenue, and became her namesake.

Their daughter, Ellen Davies, married Richard Stockton Rush, who became chairman of Peregrine Oil and Gas Co. in Burlingame and the Natomas Co., an oil giant in San Francisco. A memorial in the Princeton Alumni Weekly characterizes the elder Rush — whose nickname was “Tock” — as a scion of two noteworthy Americans who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Rush founded OceanGate Expeditions Inc., which on its website purports to make the ocean depths “more accessible for human exploration than ever before,” using “state-of-the-art technology” to develop five-person submersibles. The website also includes a biography of Rush, touting his record as the world’s youngest jet transport rated pilot in 1981, when he was 19.

The company began leading expeditions to the Titanic in 2021. In an interview with the the Associated Press that year, Rush said he wanted to assess and document the ancient ship’s decaying remains “before it all disappears or becomes unrecognizable.”

His current underwater voyage brought five people aboard the Titan, “a revolutionary carbon fiber and titanium submersible with a depth range of 4,000 meters,” the website says. In addition to Rush, they include a British businessman with a thirst for adventure, a Titanic expert who previously led missions to explore the ship’s debris and a father and son from a wealthy Pakistani family, the Associated Press reports.

The father, Shazada Dawood, is a member of the board of trustees for SETI Institute, a Mountain View nonprofit that explores signs of extraterrestrial life.

Rescue teams have frantically searched for the lost submersible since Sunday night, operating on the fear that the crew’s oxygen supply could run out by 6 a.m. Thursday morning. On Wednesday a Canadian aircraft “detected underwater noises” in the area where the submersible disappeared.

Reach Rachel Swan: rswan@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @rachelswan