OceanGate, the company behind the doomed Titanic sub, has appointed an investment banker as its new CEO to lead it through ongoing investigations

• OceanGate has appointed Gordon Gardiner as its new CEO after the former chief died in June.
• Gardiner will lead it through investigations and the closure of its operations, the company said.

OceanGate has appointed a new CEO after its former chief, Stockton Rush, died in the implosion of the Titan submersible in June.

The company, which operated the sub that went on the fatal expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, has tapped Gordon Gardiner, a former investment banker, as its head.

OceanGate told Insider on Friday that Gardiner had been appointed as its CEO and director "to lead OceanGate through the ongoing investigations and closure of the company's operations."

Gardiner is also the chair of the Seattle-based Quantum Holdings and is a general partner at the investment firm Swiftsure Capital. He previously served as the CEO of the restaurant-ordering platform TableSafe from 2017 to 2021.

He spent 15 years at JPMorgan and worked at its offices in New York, San Francisco, and Europe. He was also a board director of six other companies over the past 15 years in industries such as technology and manufacturing.

Gardiner, who grew up outside Boston, has a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, where he was captain of its heavyweight rowing crew. He completed an executive program for growing companies at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

OceanGate told Insider that Gardiner has lived in Seattle for 26 years and is an avid skier and bicyclist.

The company took down its social-media pages last month and said it would suspend "all exploration and commercial operations" following the implosion of its Titan sub, which killed five passengers.

The sub was reported missing on June 18 during an expedition to the Titanic wreckage, which is nearly 13,000 feet below the ocean surface. It lost communications with its support ship an hour and 45 minutes into the trip.

The US Coast Guard said four days later that all of its passengers had died after it found debris from the sub on the ocean floor, which indicated there had been an implosion.

The former CEO and cofounder of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, was on board the Titan sub, along with the British billionaire Hamish Harding, the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood's 19-year-old son Suleman.

The sub had only reached the depth of the Titanic wreck on about 13 out of 90 dives, the company's passenger-liability waiver said, at the time of its final dive. This means the company may have only had a success rate of about 14% for its Titanic-depth dives.