He'd be considered a reckless asshole and probably be looking at charges, and definitely sued into bankruptcy because whoever he sold it to would have presumably kept using it and this would have still happened.
Only difference is he'd still be alive to face the music.
He'd have had to go into hiding.
Don't think anyone looks upto people whose ideas cause well publicized disasters that cost lives.
Nah. Selling your company involves a shit-ton of diligence, which in this case would have included deep dives (heh) on both the physical equipment and the tecnology/specs/ip. All prior inspections, reports, etc.,plus new, etc. Unless he had hid information and they dumbly didn't do their own vetting, almost certainly he would not have been legally liable for anything disclosed by seller or assessed by buyers. They'd basically have warranties that said, "except as disclosed in schedule x, as of x date, there are no known existing [probably long technical description of specific types of defects]," with acknowledgment by buyers that they've had an opportunity to do any testing they want and understand vessel is experimental and not certified, and seller isn't warrantying the thing for any specific purpose. And buying the company means assumptions of all assets and liabilities, again subject to carveouts for, e.g.., specific known existing or threatened litigation and other negotiated types of potential liabilities.
Then once they own and run the operations, every next choice to reuse the thing or not, maintain it or not, etc., is theirs.
Short version: if he'd been able to find someone lunatic enough to buy an extremely risky business that was a long way from scaling that would make the numbers make sense (if ever a possibility), they would have been stuck with the liability, absent fraud in disclosures and the like.
Of course you could try suing the designer on some idea that it was inherently flawed (design defect, in product liability parlance), but if they weren't responsible for deciding to send it out to sea with people in it and didn't misrepresent anything, not sure how you get there especially if they had sold the thing as experimental only.
Its equally retarded because all Zuck did was make Facebook (from which he stole from people to rake in the profits himself), so breaking things in that space didn't really herald any major consequences other than shitty social media sites or failed sources of revenue. Not actual harm.
Now its applied from everything to submersibles to fucking lab grown meat to drugs to medical testing, shit I'm pretty sure he didn't fucking intend for that methodology to be used on. And its having disastrous consequences.
Venture capital isn't new, guys. And it works/has worked in many cases, for all stakeholders. Someone has an idea, builds a little thing, needs money and expertise to take to a functioning level, then more, then it hits ceiling growth and it's either up or out.
Agree it's short-circuited now, and often there is no pretense of these reaching "functioning business" level, but rather are often gobbled up by a larger firm too lazy to build their own, so they get a pre-built thing and competition elimination all in one move. And there is a ton of money going to mediocre buzzword-heavy companies providing much less actual value than they or pushy VCs think (
cough, honeycomb.io,
cough). But SV specifically has been roaring for nearly 30 years now.
That’s not how tort lawyers work. They sue you, they sue the previous owner, they sue the manufacturer, or more than one if they can, they sue whoever made the parts, they sue some dude you talked to in a bar, they sue your mom, etc.
Anyone can sue for anything. And product liability is lucrative for a reason. But just being sued doesn't mean losing a suit, though it is an expensive headache and maybe there's a settlement.
In this hypothetical case, though, there's really no "product manufacturer" in the sense of a car parts maker or ski binding fabricator. It's going to be harder to win a design defect or manufacture argument for a one-off experimental thing. (The fact it had been used commercially is a wrinkle but not necessarily fatal.). So if they had sold the company or the submersible, I'd say a good lawyer would have strongly advised a disclaimer of commercial fitness or fitness for any purpose and emphasized the experimental nature of the thing, all up and down the deal.
And after sale it's the new ownership that chooses whether to improve the design/manufacture and get certified or inspected, manages upkeep, determines testing/monitoring cadence, and decides whether to take civilians underwater in it, so none of that goes toward the seller.
Eta: only a fool would have bought this company, obviously.
