Stockton Rush was a 'local Elon Musk character' in the coastal city near Seattle where OceanGate set up its offices, says a friend of the late CEO

• A friend of late late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said Rush was a "local Elon Musk character."
• For eight years, John Lundin ran a business that was next to OceanGate, per The Everett Herald.

A friend of the late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said the submersible inventor was much like the local version of Elon Musk in the coastal Washington State city where OceanGate set up its offices.

"He was kind of our own local Elon Musk character," John Lundin, owner of Bluewater Organic Distilling, told The Everett Herald on June 23.

According to The Everett Herald, Lundin had been business neighbors with Rush for eight years in the city of Everett, which is around 25 miles north of Seattle. Lundin was also friends with Rush, and the latter frequented the bar with OceanGate's employees.

Lundin's bar and OceanGate's office were both located at the Port of Everett's Waterfront Center. In fact, the two businesses were connected by an inner hallway, per The Everett Herald.

"He was kind, very charismatic, and a natural leader. I admired his .drive and his pioneering exploration, very boldly taking on this frontier," Lundin told The Everett Herald.

Rush, much like Musk, attempted to push the envelope on technology he thought would disrupt his industry. He also "relished playing the maverick genius" and compared himself to Musk and Steve Jobs, wrote CBS correspondent David Pogue in a June 27 story for New York Magazine.

That inspiration also translated to Rush's work with OceanGate. Rush's co-founder, Guillermo Söhnlein told The New York Times on June 23 that their company's goal was to make "deep-sea voyaging as accessible to wealthy tourists and researchers as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk had made space travel."

"Internally, we called ourselves SpaceX for the ocean," Söhnlein told The Times.

Rush had big ambitions for his seafaring company. Besides venturing into deep-sea tourism, Rush had his sights set on the oil and gas industry as well. Rush told Fast Company in April 2017 that he planned to pitch his submarine technology to companies mining oil and gas from the ocean, and that deep-sea submersible tourism was part of that larger plan.

Rush was declared dead after the US Coast Guard said on June 22 that the Titan submersible had likely imploded. He was on board the ill-fated submersible with four other passengers when it vanished during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck on June 18.

Representatives for Bluewater Organic Distilling and OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.