The Real Thai Cave Rescue, Pt 1: Elon Musk’s Submarine

The first chapter from a 5+ year investigation into what really happened, how and why the media misreported it, and why the truth still matters—even if you dislike Musk.

Custom artwork commissioned from the lovely and talented Noah Meyer.

This story is about a submarine. But to tell that story well, we need to zoom out a bit to understand the rescue and its personalities from a wider view. The good news is that what you’ll find here weaves together a vast mix of sources into a unified whole that’s never been available in one place before. The bad news is that it’s also almost 10,000 words, with 60+ footnotes. But don’t worry, there’s a TLDR summary for those who want the gist. For the rest, maybe better to think of it less as an extremely long post and more an extremely concise book.

Before you scroll to the summary though, an important guiding note: none of what follows is about invalidating the good that anyone contributed. Much of it was heroic, and the parts that weren’t don’t cancel out the positives. Flaws need to be judged in balance, in context, and on an individual basis. And with some empathy.

We understand that the leaders of the British rescue team may disagree with us in places. We’ve given them ample opportunities to argue our findings, along with a standing offer to publish any response they might have in full. While we can’t speak to what evidence or counter-claims they may have withheld from us, a good deal of our sourcing here comes from their own testimonies. 

The TLDR summary follows the below introduction.

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Introduction

Back in the summer of 2018, twelve boys and one of their soccer coaches were rescued from the flooded bowels of Thailand’s Tham Luang cave system. It was one of the biggest news stories of the year, and one of the most mistold. 

The way most heard it, a crack team of British cave divers blindly and bravely inched their way through an underwater maze, found the huddled boys right where a fellow Brit caver said they'd be, then used their unparalleled experience to devise a bold rescue plan, which they carried out to perfection with rigorous preparation and a spot or two of good luck. And all this despite the interference of meddlesome billionaire Elon Musk, who’d parachuted himself in to drop off a death trap of a would-be rescue vehicle in a deranged PR stunt.

But only parts of that are true really, in any full sense. And the bits that are true are only partial scenes in the larger and more jarring tapestry of what actually happened.

The real rescue was a clusterfuck of warring fiefdoms and fractured communication, best symbolized by a zip-tied coach being desperately jabbed with ketamine after he’d clawed at the air hose of a rescuer who’d been recruited so late that he’d missed all the drills and prep meetings, who was only there at all because unchecked egos had sidelined several of the divers who’d first made the rescue possible. The whole operation was profoundly messy, and wasn’t quite contingent on the Brits, who’d given up their hopes and their cave access early on, only to be invited back in by a diver that one of them would later get sent packing, who’d helped make the first real progress through the muddy waters while they were off sightseeing.

And if the most popular reporting Disney-fied the rescue’s Plan A, it did even less justice to all the prep work for the Plan Bs that would surely have been tried had the Plan A that was expected to end with no fewer than three to five dead kids not outperformed its odds by a truly miraculous margin. Or, rather, the most popular coverage focused on exactly one part of one Plan B, in ways that were extremely incorrect, which is our primary focus here.

It turns out that the most viral accounts—like rescuer Vern Unsworth’s infamous CNN interview snippet and the follow-on New York Times opinion piece that set off Elon Musk’s spat with him—were nearly all wrong. Not wrong in some subjective sense, but wrong as to the basic facts on which their criticisms were predicated. 

This matters. 

Thus our attempt at getting the record corrected. Or at least the beginning of that process, starting with the wild story of Elon Musk’s submarine. 

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TLDR Summary

(Major claims without a link or footnote here are covered in more detail later on.)

1. Vern Unsworth, who isn’t a cave diver, had minimal firsthand knowledge of the rescue’s dive path, had made an incorrect initial prediction that could have nuked the rescue effort, had no unique knowledge about where the trapped kids were (and was mistaken in his guess, which he later lied about), was wrong about Musk’s sub and his having been asked to leave the cave, and when put under oath cited his sub claims entirely to a YouTube video.

2. Despite all this, Unsworth made off-air criticisms to CNN about Musk and his sub, which they then had him repeat on the air, presumably because they made for good TV.¹ A New York Times columnist then dogpiled on this interview (and on a mistaken statement from a Thai official), which led to Musk’s outburst. 

3. Not only was the sub not Musk’s original idea,² he was repeatedly encouraged in making it by the lead rescue diver, Rick Stanton—even after Plan A was already working and four of the boys had already been rescued.

4. The sub was designed to the rough size specs provided by Stanton.³ The only concerns of it fitting through the cave ever voiced by the British rescue team came from Unsworth (no firsthand knowledge) and an unnamed source who may have also been Unsworth.

5. Though fit was never likely to be an issue, Musk’s team had prepared a detailed set of contingencies there anyway, which went largely unreported.

6. Though Stanton never inspected the sub himself, at a rescue afterparty he and fellow divers apparently communicated an “11” level of excitement about it to Musk’s engineers, and even agreed to come to SpaceX to collaborate on a v2.⁴

7. Stanton’s original public stance on the sub was that, not having been shown it, he couldn’t comment on it. He then changed his tune starting some two months later,⁵ with criticisms that were either vague, subjective, or based on bad assumptions. When pressed on this, he was less than forthcoming.⁶ He was happy to criticize, but not to explain. (While he’d sent Musk a list of flags in reply to pictures of a test unit, many of these were factored into its final design.)

8. While the sub was never part of Plan A, it arrived in time to be part of a Plan B that the rescuers worried would be needed for one (really two) smaller boys. Hence why Stanton prompted Musk to continue development even after Plan A was already going more successfully than anticipated.

9. Musk and his team contributed significant resources outside the sub, which also went mostly reported. (The engineers he sent were also praised specifically for listening and for not forcing either their own ideas or their own innovations.)⁷

While Musk deserved real censure for his choice of words about Unsworth, it’s dishonest to vilify a bad response without also considering what led to it. Both matter. And not only did these journalists not do that, but in the face of counter-evidence they either ignored it or doubled down. We think this is a problem, and that it deserves more serious dialogue.

After all, what's the point of covering these rescues? To celebrate the human spirit no doubt, but surely also so that we can learn something. When similar emergencies arise, what lessons can we apply from Thailand? What worked? What didn't? Do we care? 

If we don’t make hard changes, those covering the next story will be just as constrained by the same broken systems and incentives, and we’ll be left just as unequipped to draw meaningful conclusions about how to make the next rescue safer. If we’re truly in this for more than the spectacle of it all, this should concern us. 

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Disclosures & Corrections

We’ve spent 1,000+ hours on this project. All major claims have detailed corroboration. If anyone finds a mistake, we’ll pay up to $1,000 USD per correction.

More details on this offer and on our bios / connection to this story here. There’s also a disclosure in there about our relationship with rescue diver Ben Reymenants, who features in this story. To keep up with any correction requests / FAQ, see this doc. 

Note that this is only a taste of what we hope to cover in a larger project. We’re leaving out some incredible color here, including personal vendettas, stolen valor, bumbled email confessions, covert call recordings, a five-figure side bet, and a hilarious religious whitewashing attempt that accidentally made this telling possible.

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I. Setting The Scene 

For a taste of how this story is still being framed, here are two recent-ish excerpts from The New Yorker, both of which passed through their vaunted fact checks:

From last July: 

Musk’s sub, which had created a media frenzy, was judged too large to wend through the narrow passageways of the caves where the boys had been trapped; Unsworth’s expertise in the cave system’s structure had, by the account of the lead diver, proved essential to the rescue. He had created a detailed map of the area and helped recruit and advise the divers who eventually brought the boys to safety.

And from last August: 

…Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.”

One thing that’s crucial to understand about this story—and what it tells us about where even prestige journalism often fails—is that even though at least 1,500 journalists covered this story, only a few of them contributed original investigative work.⁸ Once a wrong narrative took hold, most⁹ follow-on reporting repeated these mistakes without ever checking to see if the original accounts were actually true. It wasn’t that contrary evidence wasn’t out there. It’s that too few felt a professional responsibility to look for it. The going narrative was doing numbers, at the expense of a notoriously popular villain, so why question it? 

To be emphatic, it’s fine to hate Musk for things he’s actually said or done. You can dislike him all you want, whether for his political views, his management style, his wealth, or for being Canadian.¹⁰ But journalists still have a duty to help readers judge individual cases by what did and didn’t really happen. Else what are we doing here? 

That said, one part of this narrative is true: Musk did indeed refer to a rescuer with an angry slur. This was wrong, and we have no exoneration for him. But exoneration is separate from contextualization, and there was an awful lot of context that was left out—largely because of how it shows the press as complicit in throwing and affirming the first punch. While two wrongs don’t make a right, it seems morally insane to us to not consider both in making our judgments. 

So let’s look at that context.

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II. Vern Unsworth

“I am the KEY. I am the BIG piece in the Jigsaw.” - Unsworth, in an email¹¹

Unsworth was an essential part of the rescue in one concrete sense: he got the British cave divers invited in. That was meaningful, and we’ll get back to that more later. But we have detailed testimony as to his other contributions, many of which were directly harmful to the rescue effort. While praiseworthy for his initiative, he wasn’t a credible source for CNN or anyone else to have turned to for expert judgment, for reasons we’ll cover in four parts. 

A. Submarine Fit

A crucial point of context: though many journalists claimed otherwise, Unsworth isn’t a cave diver. He made this clear multiple times, and even complained about it:

Thanks mate just wish the media would stop referring to me as a ‘diver’ and Ex-Pat. Lost count on how many times I’ve said I’m not either.¹²

Unsworth is a dry caver, meaning his knowledge of the cave is limited to navigating it on the ground when not in a flooded state. While the press made hay of various supposed restrictions in the dive path,¹³ only one significant one was part of a path you’d take as a dry caver¹⁴—a “chimney” that formed part of the approach to Chamber 3, the main staging point for the divers and supply teams. 

Here’s a good video of this restriction to give the sense:

Of note, this restriction wasn’t actually relevant to what Unsworth told CNN. His comments were about the sub not making it “the first 50 meters into the cave from the dive start point”. But that start point was in Chamber 3, on the far side of this chimney.

Secondly, the chimney wasn’t a real obstacle anyway, as the submarine had been built to the rough specs provided by Stanton, which obviously factored in this very notable section of the route. (Musk’s team had also been provided a clear video of it by another cave diver, Ben Reymenants, which is part of the above footage.)

Even so, in an abundance of caution, Musk’s team worked up three contingencies:

1. As the chimney was dry and in an accessible area, it was trivial to just expand it. (Some work was done on this earlier by others, as you can see in the above clip.)

2. The team brought a sheet metal “fit check” cut to the same dimensions as the sub, which was collapsible so as to not block the passage if it got stuck.

3. A shorter sub was also being fabricated as a backup. (Musk took the main one first because he was already scheduled to fly out to China, and bringing it on his personal plane was the fastest path there.) 

Another important thing: the sub only had to make this part of the journey once.¹⁵

Now, there was a notable artificial restriction a bit deeper into the cave, which it seems Unsworth was thinking of in his comments.¹⁶ The rope rescue line had been initially advanced in low/zero visibility, and part of it got tangled in what divers call a “line trap”, where it weaved through some stalactites. Unfortunately this was never fixed once visibility improved, which complicated things. But this restriction wasn’t a blocker for the submarine either,¹⁷ and Vern had never experienced it himself, as cavers do not traditionally climb along ceilings.

The real crux though is that several of the rescue support divers we interviewed thought it would have fit just fine, and none said otherwise. Cumbersome and unideal, sure, but worth a try if Plan A was no longer viable. We gave Stanton himself opportunities to object to this, which he never did. If you want to judge for yourself, we recommend this episode of National Geographic’s Drain the Oceans, which includes more footage and a precise 3D rendering.

Why did people believe fit was an issue? Because of Unsworth, along with an anonymous “spokesman for Mr. Stanton”. But who was this mystery fellow? We asked Unsworth, Stanton and the British Cave Rescue Council, among others. No one would own it. Nor did Stanton answer why he’d never spoken up against a claim made in his name that he knew to be untrue. 

Journalists are allowed to grant anonymity where it protects a source from expected harm. One wonders what the potential harm here was, or whether the NYT simply helped out someone who didn’t want to be held accountable. 

(This isn’t just a general point. For a relevant example of an anonymous source making false claims, note how BuzzFeed News “confirmed” that Unsworth was actually a cave diver here and here. Yet when put under oath, he affirmed that he absolutely is not.¹⁸ He’d also reported being tired of the press getting this wrong. So who was this source? Who had the motive?)

B. Wrong Location

“The search was going nowhere, the conditions were worsening by the hour and we had no idea where the boys were,” said Unsworth. - The London Times

He was partially correct here: no one could know their location with certainty. But there were only two likely options for refuge, both of which were common knowledge to many locals. Unsworth happened to guess wrong, whereas one of the boys’ friends pointed out the more likely one, which extends up ~10x higher off the cave floor.

To make sense of what follows, here’s a simplified map of the cave that reflects National Geographic’s ultra-precise scanning:

Custom artwork commissioned from the lovely and talented Daniela Meyer.

Lots of bad maps, graphics, and descriptions were shared during the rescue, some of which gave the impression that this cave is a maze. It isn’t. It’s essentially a long tunnel with minimal side passages, all of which end fairly quickly. As Unsworth said, it wasn’t a cave you could get lost in if you went in on foot.

While the cave does split in two at a t-junction, the most common destination was to the south. And given that the northern path leads to an effective dead end and offers no safety, if they’d gone that way they were dead, and the flow of the water would have likely pushed at least one body back to the junction. The open question was really just if the boys had made it to high ground in time, whether at the lower (near Chamber 8) or higher (Chamber 9) southern location. Confusingly though, both spots were referred to by many using the same name: Pattaya Beach. 

The first is a sort of natural amphitheater, with shelves starting a few feet above the cave floor. Though he later tried some incredible revisionist history here, this is where Unsworth told the British divers to look, and what led to their surprise when they found it flooded and empty:

I pointed to my compass, indicating that we had gone past Pattaya Beach. … ‘What the fuck is [Unsworth] going on about? There’s nowhere here that would have survived the floods of Thursday and Friday.’ This was absolutely Pattaya Beach, and the boys were clearly not there. - Rick Stanton, from his book on the rescue, pg. 150

Though Stanton adds in a footnote that Unsworth had simply gotten the name wrong and always meant the other location, this feels like a halfhearted attempt to vindicate him, as it’s clearly contradicted by all the available evidence¹⁹—including the below map, with Unsworth’s name on it, that marks Pattaya Beach at Chamber 8. 

The second location, Chamber 9, was an aven, or basically a hill that extended up some 124 feet (good visualization here). This is where the kids were holding up—which makes sense, as the amphitheater had submerged with the rising water, pushing the boys from there (where they slept the first night) to the one real safe area. 

Both were reasonable enough guesses. And it wasn’t a big issue in itself that Unsworth happened to predict the wrong one, as the rescue wasn’t going to just stop there. It’s more that: (1) his supposedly unique insight here lent him unearned credibility, (2) he then later lied about having been right all along, (3) it elides that the Brits could have just done what the Thai Navy SEALs did and asked a local, some of whom rightly saw Chamber 9 as much more likely.

C. An Almost Fatal Prediction

More concerning than the location mixup, Unsworth’s guesswork also played a large role in the Brits giving up on the rescue early on. 

They’d been unable to make any progress on their initial dive from Chamber 3, given no visibility and a strong current. But they also took Unsworth at his word about the likely extent of the flooding, leading them to judge that the risks weren’t worth it to retrieve likely corpses. So they rescinded their cave access, requested flights home, and went off sightseeing with Unsworth (having been asked to not leave the country just yet for optical reasons).²⁰

While they were out, another team (Reymenants and Polejaka), who believed the boys could still be alive, decided to try again—in part under the hope that a letup in the rain had changed the diving conditions just enough, and in part to block the brave Thai Navy SEALs from more risky diving they were less trained for.²¹ Miraculously, this worked. One of these two divers, Reymenants, then offered to let the Brits come back in under his own access.²² (He would later be repaid with crude Keep Out signs as to his own re-entry, though that’s another story.)²³

Once the Brits were readmitted and dove again, they found that several of the remaining sections leading to the t-junction were only partially flooded, which changed their tune: 

To my surprise, we soon surfaced in a canal passage that was at least 100 metres long. Vern had predicted that most of the cave beyond Chamber 3 would be sumped, but for once he had been wrong. … This left hope that the boys could have found sanctuary when they’d become trapped, instead of being overwhelmed by the flood. This was a turning point. For the first time since we’d arrived, we were considering the possibility that they might still be alive. - Rick Stanton, pg. 145

It’s not that Unsworth didn’t know the cave. Of course he did. But he knew it as a dry caver. His insight into conditions in the far reaches of the cave, when flooded, was just guesswork, and his main guess happened to be wrong. But this had consequences. Were it not for the stubborn actions of other divers, this might have led to the rescue being abandoned altogether.²⁴ 

D. Non-Cooperation

Unsworth had deep problems getting along with the Thai Navy SEALs who’d come in to formalize the operation after he and others had attempted their own initial rescue. He held, at best, a declining respect for them. As just one taste of this, he went so far as to refer to them in a private chat using a local slur, kwaai, which translates to “buffalo” and is used to compare someone to a dumb beast of low understanding.²⁵

This friction led the Thais to call in alternates to work in parallel, including a Thai geographer and a few non-British cave divers. Somewhat predictably, this didn’t solve the problem. When the other divers arrived, Unsworth (and Volanthen) clashed with one of them (Reymenants) too, over some borrowed rope that was later credited as instrumental to the rescue.²⁶ 

But while figuring out where the kids were wasn’t an issue that required Unsworth’s help, actually getting to them was, kind of. The exit from the cave’s t-junction that connected it to the southward path was in a tricky spot submerged in a growing pool of murky water. If rescuers couldn’t find it, progress was impossible. While Unsworth was hardly the only one with this information, he knew it well. That was valuable.

The work of pathfinding towards the boys was done by three teams: (1) two Brits (Stanton and Volanthen), (2) two Europeans (Ben Reymenants and Maksym “Max” Polejaka), (3) the Thai Navy SEALs. By luck of the draw, it was Reymenants and Polejaka who were up once the line had been advanced back to the t-junction. But, per Reymenants, Unsworth himself didn’t give them any guidance on where to look, nor a map. It fell on a third Brit, Rob Harper, to give him the needed insight, when the latter happened to walk by the former on his final bathroom break,²⁷ which is what later set up the Brits to be the ones to reach the kids on their next shift. 

E. Other Contributions

So far as we can tell, the sum of Unsworth’s involvement otherwise was:

• He nobly and readily jumped in to help with the earliest rescue effort, before additional flooding forced them all out. This was certainly commendable.

• He assisted his fellow Brits (and perhaps others?) with food and supplies, and played tour guide for them. Again, great.

• He asked Josh Morris, an American caver there as a translator and liaison,²⁸ to push for the rescue to be entrusted to the Brits. (It’s unclear what impact this had, though it certainly could have been additive to the growing push in that direction.)

• He may have helped carry some of the boys out, as part of a ~200 person convoy, in the same way one might symbolically carry the Olympic torch for a stretch.

Overall, you have a guy who played a key role in getting the other Brits involved, and was willing to sacrificially do whatever he could to help. This was noble, and good. But what he knew about the cave (relevant to the rescue) was mostly common knowledge, and his concrete predictions were both wrong, one almost ruinously. 

As for Musk’s involvement, Unsworth seems to have just picked up rumors. When pressed in court to provide evidence that he was speaking about the sub based on real knowledge, he was only able to point to a YouTube video.²⁹ He was similarly unable to validate his claim that Musk had been asked to leave the cave (he’d been invited in by a Thai official, at their insistence³⁰). 

This may be why his comments to CNN were made off-air at first. They were gossip, not news. But they were apparently too juicy to pass on, or to verify.

Which brings us to the New York Times follow-on that sparked Musk’s infamous comment. 

(We’re not naming names here. While you can trivially figure out who all these journalists are, mobs are bad and this isn’t at all about any one person. Please do not tweet at them! Direct your attention at institutions and systems, not individuals.)

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III. The Newspaper of Record

I was also aware that most people’s knowledge of the rescue was very limited due to the poor journalistic reporting…. - Rick Stanton

Starting about a day after Unsworth’s CNN interview, a New York Times columnist piled on, in both an opinion piece and then a supporting Twitter thread. Outside of blindly taking Unsworth’s comments and credentials at face value, their entire narrative was also just fundamentally irreconcilable with how the rescue actually unfolded. Their commentary reads as if a loaded thesis about tech CEOs had already been written, with the specific charges just bolted on:

The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy, high-profile action. But what got the kids and their coach out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach to problems, one that has turned many risky enterprises into safe endeavors…

Uhh, from risky to safe? Safe? As being relevant here?

• The divers doped weakly kids with benzos, atropine, and ketamine.³¹ The last drug had to be re-upped repeatedly, based more on whim than science.³² This was like 20 chapters outside the standard playbook. It had never been tried, anywhere, except on a wild seal, once, kind of.³³

• A few of these injections were done by a diver who’d missed the initial drills and prep meetings. He was only told about the drugs as the rescue was starting, which was news he was left to process as the divers who knew the cave swam on ahead. After deciding to press on anyway, new terrors in mind, he promptly got lost. 

• This diver’s training to inject these drugs was a pantomime. The others at least got to try on a water bottle, once. He was also assigned on the last day to carry out the boys’ coach, whose identity he only learned after his dive, which was after the under-drugged coach had risked both their lives, in two separate incidents.³⁴

• This dive was through waters cold enough that a fit ex-Navy SEAL, who was not on a cocktail of drugs, died in them just days earlier.³⁵ One boy’s temperature dropped as low as roughly 85F / 29C. There were near misses, and blown handoffs. No one had thought to mark the stations each support diver was supposed to be at. Several boys were in there much longer than they had to be.

• The coordinating US Air Force team predicted a 30-40% fatality rate, which was sunny compared to the best-case 50% expectation of the anaesthetist who sedated the boys. His take: “I didn’t feel comfortable in any way, shape or form about what we were doing. … It felt like euthanasia to me.”³⁶ And elsewhere: “I still maintain that it was the most dangerous and impossible solution to this problem, and I really held that view until the last boy came out..”

It’s great that this all worked out! But nothing like this had ever been attempted, and the Aussie doctors had to ask the Thai government to waive liability for a reason. It was a plan of desperation; a Hail Mary that Mary apparently heard. But not being himself a believer in prayer, Stanton also sensibly kept at least one iron in the fire for a Plan B, even after Plan A’s initial success—by once again affirming that Musk should build his mini-sub.

“We all knew that the integrity of the face mask’s seal would likely be the failure point, and we were open to hearing options to address this risk. … I hadn’t been able to think of another plan with any of the materials that were available to us, but maybe if something useful could be created by a team of engineers… John and I agreed that if anybody could help us, it was Elon Musk.” - Rick Stanton, pg. 299³⁷

Plan A was good, execution errors aside, in that it was their best shot. But it wasn’t safe. It was the exact kind of “improbable long shot” that’s derided in this column. The Brits just happened to think two long shots better than only one.

Heroes and Villains

This columnist has a Pulitzer prize, as does a colleague of theirs who recently co-reported a wildly slanted story about Musk with the journalist in the next section. We don’t bring this up to say they were unworthy of their awards. We only mean to illustrate that even the very best journalists can easily lose sight of their objectivity and the importance of due care when it comes to chasing “the premium outcome”. 

It’s important that powerful figures like Musk are held to account. But if this isn’t done well, it’s worse than it not being done at all. And it’s often done…less than well.

In their supporting thread, this columnist added that “the worst thing to do to a famous/rich person is to be their uncritical fan”. While we agree, there’s an inverse point about perceived underdogs. Good journalism can’t be uncritical in either direction! But consider how Unsworth, who isn’t a diver, is framed in this same thread: “This diver is not a bystander—if someone made a movie, I’d make him the key character.” Unsworth was made to be the wronged hero because it was a good narrative, and it was so good that no one ever verified it. 

Anyway, it was to this thread (and linked CNN interview) that Musk replied with his very heated comment about Unsworth. That comment, however inappropriate and unkind, did not come from a vacuum. It came from a man very, very tired of this shit, who had done a good thing, which he’d been encouraged to do by those in the arena, who nevertheless got punished for it by journalists too eager with their takes to first step back and ask if they were zealous or right. 

We can judge both this and Musk. We should judge both. It’s morally insane to not judge both.

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IV. Never Skip Leg(work) Day

One thing that hampers me is my poor memory, but I think I’ve pretty much got everything accurate from my point of view. - Rick Stanton

Stanton’s first public criticisms of the sub (that we’re aware of) surfaced in an interview he did with BuzzFeed News in September, some two months after the rescue. While Stanton hadn’t personally inspected it in the interim,³⁸ Unsworth had since shaken a suit at Musk, and the sub was again a story. 

Had Stanton’s criticisms here been clear and forthright, this delay in voicing them was fine. But his criticisms weren’t clear and forthright. What he offered was:

• That he “did not recall providing exact specifications to Musk”

• That the sub “was not developed enough”, and more specifically lacked “the necessary life support systems”

• That anyway the sub additionally wasn’t considered because Plan A was “already well underway”

There are deep problems with each of these claims:

• Stanton had provided Musk with rough size specs, and had received back the planned dimensions³⁹ of the sub along with an offer to modify it if need be, which Stanton was silent to

• Stanton also provided other brusque input on life support systems, which were considered in its final design, which Stanton again never inspected⁴⁰

• Musk had also added that he didn’t “want to put it on a plane if you think there are important changes needed”, to which he received no further feedback

• Plan A was “already well underway” (four boys were already out) when Stanton emailed Musk again to tell him to “please keep working on the capsule details”, as they were still “worried about the smallest lad” 

(We gave Stanton a chance to clarify if BuzzFeed had simply misreported his comments, to which he provided no real answer.)

The lead reporter here could have asked Stanton why he’d continued encouraging Musk to build the sub even after the first rescue day, and after his initial disapproving comments. There was a known reason for this, and Musk had already made relevant emails with Stanton public back in July. (The reporter did, to their partial credit, ask for more of his emails with Stanton, which we’ve collected in full into a handy timeline here. But if you only ask for more after ignoring the ones already out there, that’s unlikely to go well!)

It’s worth noting that this lead reporter also has a (co-authored) book on Musk coming out. They’ve materially advanced their career on the back of reporting on Musk,⁴¹ and as I’ve covered eg. here, some of this reporting is, at best, flawed in a structurally prejudicial way. While I suspect the book will be right in places, how will readers know which claims are and aren’t based on real legwork? 

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V. A Study in Leadership 

There are two things easy to conflate: (1) the Brits being ideal choices as lead rescue divers, and (2) the Brits being ideal choices to lead the rescue effort. 

Believing the first isn’t at all controversial. They were obvious choices. But this is wholly separate from the skills that go into broader leadership, like communication and collaboration. They were not especially good at this, as they themselves testify to:

Laughing off the idea of being bad team players isn’t an aside. Plan A’s execution had a lot of gaps that less insular leadership should have caught and solved for:

• The Brits’ insistence on using their own divers based on idiosyncratic trust and “the right experience” meant several qualified exits⁴² and at least three late arrivals. By Stanton’s own admission, they weren’t even left with enough divers for their own original Plan A (though it was likely worse anyway).⁴³

• The line trap was never fixed, causing at least one diver to lose hold of it while carrying one of the boys out, and several to struggle.⁴⁴ (To his credit, Stanton acknowledged this mistake in his book.)⁴⁵ The fix was somewhat trivial, and would have greatly improved safety.

• At least one of the support divers wasn’t taught the trick to this line trap, where they could avoid the narrowest underwater restriction.⁴⁶ This created a problem on the first rescue day when said diver was asked to relieve one of the Brits (Jewell) and carry a boy out through this section, and wasn’t able to on first go.

• Nothing was done to mark the stations for the support divers, leading to a lot of confusion and failed handoffs (and some yelling at divers who didn’t deserve it).

• They didn’t have anyone double-check the boys’ sizes, leading to a troublesome surprise when they realized, at quite literally the last possible moment, that not one but two boys had mask fit issues.⁴⁷

• They never really came up with a plan for said issues, and were only bailed out because a Thai volunteer took it upon himself to retrofit a smaller mask.⁴⁸

• They also just weirdly accepted the limitation of only having four masks they really trusted. Reymenants owns a dive shop, and several other divers were based locally. Give them the make and model and get people calling! Or ask Musk!⁴⁹

• Their “no filming” policy made it difficult for later-arriving divers to really understand the route.⁵⁰ One of the support divers, when asked what he’d do differently, went straight to suggesting that all divers be asked to use GoPros.

It’s lovely that none of these planning issues turned fatal. But they easily could have, and you can’t judge a plan only by its outcome. A run of good luck is not itself a great blueprint for repeatable success, and there will be more rescues to come. 

Alternate Reality

With all the typical caveats about counterfactuals, let’s also imagine a scenario in which all the Brits were just never involved:

• The Thai Navy Seals would have done exactly what they did, and asked locals where the boys were likely to be, and gotten pointed to Chamber 9.

• While map quality varied, the main issue was incorrect distances (also true of Unsworth’s maps). The actual orientation of where to go to get to Chamber 9 was well understood. As Unsworth himself said, the boys weren’t missing, but trapped.⁵¹ They didn’t need to be found so much as reached.

• That the Brits were the ones to reach the kids was incidental, and involved them breaking their own safety rule.⁵² The teams were diving in rotation, and if the Brits hadn’t made it far enough then the next team up would have gotten there.

• Getting through the t-junction would have been trickier, but again many locals knew roughly where the exit was, and they weren’t looking for a pinhole. This would have just slowed them down. Precious time, but not itself a dealbreaker.⁵³

• Other Thai-based cave divers were already coming in on their own initiative, and it was Reymenants and Polejaka (along with the indefatigable Thai SEALs) who did the initial pathfinding through the hardest area. While the Brits did a crack job of adding two quite long sections, both were through easier areas that the most competent divers on site could have managed.⁵⁴ 

• Reymenants was already in contact with the same Aussie doctors who came up with the actual Plan A used.⁵⁵

• The other divers all got along with the Thais, and likely wouldn’t have fractured the communication structure into silos.

• Stanton admitted in his book being “extremely skeptical” that the low oxygen reading in the cave was correct.⁵⁶ While being mum about this suspicion was perhaps tactically shrewd in building urgency for action, it’s also the sort of thing that kills trust when discovered.

This isn’t at all to diminish Stanton and Volanthen as divers, as athletes, as tinkerers, or as men of very admirable bravery. Counterfactuals aside, their rescue got 13/13 out alive. They deserve their laurels for that! But looking forward to future rescues, have they mended their ways? You really do need leaders who can play well with others. That’s not just important, but essential.

---

VI. King Richard

(We’re leaving out Stanton’s partner, John Volanthen, for much of this. He was for the sub being made, never voiced a criticism of it, and didn’t testify on Unsworth’s behalf.) 

While strong egos are common amongst experts in one niche or another, what separates ego and arrogance is the ability to trust that others know things too, along with minimum baselines of curiosity and humility. It’s fine to be confident because you’ve really put in all the work. It’s quite another to skip to conclusions based on knee-jerk judgments, and to be slow to reconsider. 

The accounts we collected all point to Stanton as a man who trusts supremely in his own intellect and judgment, often requiring others to prove themselves to his standards before being all that interested in what they have to say. 

For a taste of this, the final paragraphs of one of his emails to me (Jeremy): 

For you to fully grasp the complexity of the [sub’s] functionality I would have to start at first principles as you’re so lacking in specific area expertise.

I guess your readers would be the same, therefore I feel no requirement to educate them. 

No one else we spoke to was like this. I’ve worked with a lot of brilliant technologists over my career, and specialize in doing comms work on the nuanced and the complex. While I wouldn’t pretend that I always follow every fine technical point, people find a way to explain, and I find a way to ask questions where I’m unsure. That Stanton engaged like this feels symptomatic. He’s claimed to have a six-page document outlining his concerns with the sub. Why not share it publicly for peer review?

Many Lions, One Pride

Stanton had Reymenants run off the cave site because of frictions that mostly boiled down to premature judgments.⁵⁷ He was constantly primed to believe negative things about Reymenants, and rarely curious enough to really look into them before deciding.⁵⁸ But Reymenants, who also consulted on the sub’s design, was no less qualified than Stanton to do so, and arguably a bit more, being a board-certified hyperbaric technologist. And of course the people who made it also know a thing or two about engineering. Some of them had day jobs working on the life support aspects of SpaceX’s Dragon space suits. That NASA trusts them was apparently not enough for Stanton to give them the benefit of some self-doubt.

Stanton responded fairly brusquely to pictures that Musk sent him of an early test unit, in an email containing more periods than question marks. It wasn’t that the things Stanton listed were unimportant; it was that his response assumed they’d been overlooked.⁵⁹ He never did inspect it to know what made the final cut.⁶⁰ He just decided, in full self-trust. 

We’ve confirmed that some of his later criticisms came down to a video he’d watched where he didn’t see air bubbles come out of the sub. But they were there. He’d just overlooked them. And then moved the goalposts.⁶¹

Might he be sitting on some criticisms that are valid? And would the sub still have needed more on-site tinkering before being used? Both are certainly possible! But Musk had a contingent of elite engineers there, and they were not idiots.

The World’s Best Cave Divers

The story of how Stanton got involved has often been told with a sort of reverse emphasis. It wasn’t that Unsworth called him up based on his reputation. Stanton reached out, via a mutual contact, to him.

As Stanton recounts in the early chapters of his book:

• He’d recently hit things off with a Thai woman who’d been visiting the UK. She returned home on the same Saturday the boys went missing, and happened to live nearby, leading her to tell Stanton about it on the Monday.

• Stanton then reached out to Volanthen, who agreed they should go help. Knowing they’d need an official invitation, they tried to secure one through various UK government officials, none of whom immediately responded.

• Undeterred, Stanton found a press release that mentioned Unsworth’s name next to that of a British cave diver Rob Harper. Stanton had met Harper once back in the early 80s, and knew how to get a hold of him, which he did. The next day, Unsworth successfully pushed two Thai ministers into inviting the three of them.

But if Harper had indeed thought of Stanton and Volanthen before, and if Unsworth had been advocating for them specifically all along, we’re left with the curious question of why Stanton had to make that contact with Harper based on online sleuthing. Had Harper really just never thought to give them a head’s up to start preparing in case Unsworth’s appeals were successful?⁶² 

Again, none of this changes the central fact that Stanton and Volanthen are extremely good at their core competencies. They might very well be the world’s best cave divers. But skill isn’t the only thing that matters. Good leaders communicate, explain, and hold their judgments softly. It was great that they were ultimately called in. If they’re called in for the next one too, we can only hope they’ve taken some of this to heart. 

---

VII. Elon Musk

Musk dropped his submarine off with the Thai Navy Seals at around midnight, between the rescue’s second and third days. This was a subject of some surprise to the Thais, most of whom didn’t know that it was coming or why. While Stanton had asked for it to be brought to his room upon arrival, it never was. And, given the hour of its arrival, he was unable to meet Musk or inspect it in person. Why he was never shown it later by the Thais may remain a mystery. 

During a media event the following morning, local Thai governor Narongsak Osatanakorn (now sadly deceased), made a comment that many took as him saying the submarine had been ruled out entirely. This wasn’t true, and didn’t come from Stanton.⁶³ The sub was still a candidate for Plan B until it could be determined if the masks would fit the smallest two boys (only one of whom the Brits knew about), and Osatanakorn was seemingly unaware of this. 

Osatanakorn’s ambiguous statement was that, though the sub was "sophisticated", it didn't "fit⁶⁴ with our mission". But as Musk rightfully pointed out on Twitter, Osatanakorn was not the subject matter expert. Stanton was, and it was Stanton who’d asked, as late as after the first set of rescues, for Musk to continue his work on it. 

(Whether Osatanakorn, as Musk also claimed, wasn’t even “the rescue chief” is thornier. For most practical purposes the Brits were running the rescue dives at this point. There was also a complex command structure on the Thai side, including several ministers and senior military folks. Notably, Osatanakorn had also been scheduled for demotion, with his transfer delayed until after the rescue. Given the intense public interests here, it's difficult to believe his say was final on larger questions, and indeed the evidence suggests it wasn’t.⁶⁵ He was valuable for his media handling and logistics, and was a good, learned man. But Musk had been dealing with the Thai Prime Minister's office directly, and may have had this context in mind.)

Scorecard

So, to recap Musk’s actions, both public and private:

• He was complimentary of all involved in his tweets, including the rescue divers. The only exceptions were his (we think correct) clarification about the Thai governor, and his over-the-line response to Unsworth’s suckerpunch.

• He never expected the sub to be used outside of an unlikely Plan B, but brought it because they asked him to, knowing Plan B might indeed be needed.

• While fairly quiet as to the PowerWalls his guys dropped off for the pumping team, the donated tools, and the scope of engineering assistance offered, Musk was loud and public about the sub and other direct rescue ideas. But only because he thought open dialogue would help there, which has long proven true for his company’s own innovations, and was widely used by the Thais (via Facebook) in their own open calls for assistance.

• He went to the cave in person because it was the fastest route to deliver the sub (he was headed to China anyway), and only went into the cave—at midnight, while no rescue operations were underway—because the Thais insisted.

• The team he sent was praised for being uniquely notable for listening, for not forcing their ideas, and for not insisting anything they built be used.⁶⁶

Apart from his reply to Unsworth, this is…bad? We want less of this? 

And as for the very regrettable exception here, consider what you'd do if you’d invested greatly in trying to be helpful, constantly deferring to the on-the-ground experts as you went, only to be met with angry tinfoil takes promoted by journalists at the largest news orgs? While you very well might not lash out so wildly, if you did lash out you’d hope that at least one of those journalists would take this as a clue to have a deeper look. But none ever did.

If your theory of the world is that Musk is too powerful and that he gets away with too much, the exact wrong strategy is to lead crusades against him that will fall apart under basic levels of scrutiny. It’s much better to be selective and precise in any outrage. That’s how you get readers to reflect, to update their perceptions, and to push alongside you in a helpful way. And how you get Musk to do the same.

Musk was in the wrong in his response, yes. And not by a little. But it’s small of us to stop our outrage there, or to absolve ourselves of the mob spirit that gave CNN the inkling that broadcasting Unsworth’s suckerpunch was a winning move. Absent that confidence, they never air the clip unchallenged and the confrontation with Musk never happens. Hopefully more raindrops will consider themselves part of the flood.

---

VIII. Closing Thoughts

(This section is by Jeremy alone.)

The Aussie doctors made a healthy point at the end of their joint book, in reference to their own investigation into some of the media myths: 

"‘At some point,’ Craig said to me, ‘you really have to question everything in the story, even the things you think you saw with your own eyes. Memory is an unreliable thing.’

There’s no substitute for slowness, for caution, for double and triple checking, or for refusing to take narratives at face value. I’ve learned a lot since my original coverage of this in 2018, which erred in places from too much media trust. I’ve been chastened into extra skepticism of what I read, of what I’m told, and of what I write. This is why I maintain a corrections policy. It’s very easy to be wrong. We ought to expect it as the default, then do something concrete about it.

There will be objections here, from some journalists, about deadlines and resource cuts and reasonable expectations. I have basically two responses to them:

1. I was able to get this story mostly right with modest amounts of time back in 2018. That writeup was then used by Musk in his initial apology to Unsworth, supplying some context as to why he’d been so worked up. Its core points hold up pretty well. 

2. Lots and lots of journalists saw that piece. But not only did it not cause them to rethink what they’d gotten wrong, they took the opposite approach:

• Many outright misrepresented what I said

• None addressed any of my concerns

• Many mentioned my piece without linking to it to let readers decide for themselves

When I appealed to the New York Times for a chance to respond, I heard crickets.

(Full recap of all this here.) 

So if the argument is that they couldn’t have done the full job, what’s the argument that they couldn’t at least have put in a matching effort to a random guy blogging from his bedroom in his spare time, who had minimal contacts or resources? 

Is this the kind of journalism we’re asking people to have faith in? I’m a subscriber to the New York Times. I want, so badly, for journalism to be better, and to be able to point my readers towards outlets they can trust. But which ones don’t have these problems? And how can readers know if they’re reading the 80% good articles or the 20% slapdash ones? And how many newspapers even reach that split?

These are not entirely rhetorical questions. 

The Lengede Miracle happened in 1963. Note all the parallels to Thailand in 2018, and how little changed. We desperately need to commit to learning something from these events to improve our odds at the next one—else we need to admit that it’s all just theater and that we want the drama more than we care about the outcome. 

May we choose better.

I’ll close by thanking my research partner, Raimund, for investing an amount of effort into this that I found remarkable, concerning, and humbling. I hope we have a chance to tell the rest in a fitting format, and in doing so to properly celebrate the unsung, downplayed, and in some cases erased contributions of other heroes who played essential roles in getting those boys out alive. 

1. Though the interview is no longer accessible on CNN's website (at least here), the original had an opening line that was cut out of many of the clips shared on Twitter back in 2018: "We just talked about this before, what your thoughts on Elon Musk’s idea was [sic]." So these weren't Unsworth’s first draft thoughts. Even so, his legal team tried to spin this in their lawsuit, claiming that he "was not at all expecting to be asked questions about [Musk] or his tube" and that his comments were "spontaneous, but well justified". But it's not an unexpected question or a spontaneous response when it's your second time answering it! When Raimund (co-author here) asked CNN about this, he was directed to their PR/Comms team, who relayed a message of "we can't comment on what was said off camera". Unsworth’s sole response was “No comments, Move on {sic]”.

2. This bit of the story is sprawling, and parts are lost to history. But the gist is that Musk and team were in a lot of brainstorms happening in parallel, some about supplying drilling assistance, some about power for the water pumps, and some about direct rescue tools. When it came to the last one, a few ideas were floated, including flexible polyurethane pods and a sort of inflatable tunnel. While the latter was abandoned as unworkable, Musk's team did coordinate with a company called Wing Inflatables to create the pods, some of which made it to the cave site. The cave divers were more in favor of a rigid rescue pod, including Bill Stone (a community legend), Ben Reymenants (one of the rescuer divers), and both Rick Stanton and John Volanthen (the two lead British divers). So Musk had his team make it.

3. Quoting from emails here. Stanton to Musk: "If you make a capsule which tightly encloses a 15 year old boy, and no bigger. It will fit through." After his team came up with a design, Musk emailed back: "It is 35 cm in diameter and 160cm long. We can make more that are longer or shorter." So Stanton had the dimensions, and in his responses said nothing about them being an issue. Though he did raise some concerns about life support systems, which we address later on (along with a minor question about the exact diameter). 

4. See trial doc 81, page 96. We confirmed this with the quoted SpaceX engineer. We also asked Stanton for comment, which he declined. While it isn't clear which other divers were present, we know from Stanton's book (pg 385) that it was at least him and Jason Mallinson.

5. His first public criticisms that we're aware of were voiced to BuzzFeed News in early September 2018. We cover them in more detail later. While it’s possible he made prior ones that we just couldn’t find, this wouldn’t really change anything, as the core dynamic remains the same. He went from “was never shown it, can’t comment on it” to having a definitively negative take. What changed? And why never substantiate it?

6. We quote part of his November 2023 email to Jeremy in a later section. We'd be happy to release the full exchange, in which he answered zero of the questions posed. Jeremy's reply was a 23-point summary of the available evidence, with a standing offer to revisit any and all of said points. Stanton didn't respond to this, and again declined to address any of them when Jeremy circled back before publication. An offer was made to even push back publication to give him more review time, so long as he'd commit to meaningful engagement. He did not take this offer.

7. Quoting from page 55 of a retrospective written by a big-deal geotechnical engineer, Prof./Dr. Suttisak Soralump, who helped out as the Thai's technology coordinator. "People came to me suggesting what to do, what not to do, but all well-intentioned. // These westerners {Musk's team] did the complete opposite. // They listened to me and took notes. They looked over the maps and other information I provided and passed those on to their team in the US and called them in real time if they, themselves, were not able to answer our questions or if some new ideas arose based on our discussion. They had listened to our needs before they told us what they had or their ideas. They did not speak of innovations I saw online, which to my understanding, were developed by a multitude of people. They did not try to persuade us to use their innovations at all."

8. The best coverage we found, by a mile, was this Maclean's piece, which we cite multiple times here. Though despite it being very good and full of excellent original reporting, it too got the story of the sub wrong, albeit in a single stray half-sentence (“The kids won’t be confined to airtight metal coffins, as Elon Musk has proposed”). This goes to show just how powerful and unchallenged this narrative was.

9. We thought well of this Ars Technica piece for being a model of more restrained coverage as to the submarine. But there weren’t many like it.

10. While we mostly include this as a joke (Jeremy is also Canadian and loves reminding people of their famous exports), Musk does still hold a Canadian citizenship.

11. Pulled from trial doc 86-2, page 20.

12. Pulled from trial doc 62, page 207. Also worth noting that I (Jeremy) too had wrongly referred to him as an expat in past writing on this story. Mea culpa. At least as of the time of the rescue, Unsworth was still a UK resident. He just visited Thailand a lot.

13. We're broadly charitable as to this reporting, as it would have been hard for any journalist to know how exact these estimates were, or eg. whether they reflected hard rock or movable sand etc. But we're charitable to the extent that they were used for story color, not as hard evidence that the sub couldn't have fit. To support that kind of an contention you'd need at least one confirmation sourced to a rescue diver. The second-hand opinion of eg. a dry caver isn't relevant, unless that caver is Peter Parker.

14. There were also a few “squeezes” on the far side of the the t-junction. But they were even less of an issue relative to the size of the sub. Per one of the British rescue divers, the popular claims that these restrictions were so tight that they had to remove their side-mounted air tanks were wrong. The sub may have just needed to be passed through ahead of a rear diver. This was still unideal though, and one big reason it wasn't considered so long as Plan A was still in play. But not a fit issue in any absolute sense.

15. This was a point of confusion for the Thai Navy SEALs (who retained ownership of the non-diving parts of the rescue from the entrance to Chamber 3), in part because the Brits had largely stopped communicating with them directly. The Thais mistakenly assumed that children would be handed over to them in the sub, which would have made extraction up the chimney trickier. But this was never the plan, as the sub was only meant to protect the smallest boys through the dive sections. And there was no particular reason to take the sub out immediately once the rescue was done, so just one trip was enough.

16. This line trap started 50ish meters from the dive point, which matches up cleanly with Unsworth’s “the first 50 meters” comment.

17. One of the divers (Reymenants), who knew the line trap well, had been in contact with Musk's team, and told him that anything with under a two-foot circumference would fit through fine (see court doc 81, pg 17). While Reymenants had never gone all the way to Chamber 9 himself, we know from one of the British divers, who had gone all the way in, that the later squeezes were both not that small and that they’d apparently never measured them. National Geographic laser measured the one between Chambers 8 and 9 and put it at about 30 inches / 76cms. So no fit issues. You can also look at 38:40 in the Drain the Oceans doc for visual representation and commentary on how some divers navigated the line trap to create several feet of extra room. A sub would have made the trip trickier for sure, though offset against the reduced risk of both hypothermia and accidentally dislodging a barely-fitting mask.

18. Pulled from trial doc 167, pg 49.

19. Also see the two "500 meter" references on page 146 of Stanton's book, which would get you to where they first looked, not Chamber 9. Plus CNN's report (based on an interview with Unsworth) that the boys were found 200 meters from his initial guess, which is roughly the distance from the far end of the amphitheater to Chamber 9. Most damningly though, in his initial lawsuit against Musk, Unsworth's own legal team (doc 1, pg 6) explicitly identifies Pattaya Beach “as a vast amphitheater-like chamber” and admits that the boys were found 200 meters away from it. It seems that Unsworth learned that Chamber 9 was also called Pattaya Beach at some point months after the rescue, and then tried to belatedly argue that he'd been right all along. (If Unsworth somehow means to argue that he had always meant Chamber 9 and that he was told that the boys were found 200 meters from that, he'd need to explain where exactly he thought they were. There was ample video of the boys being found in an aven that is very, very clearly Chamber 9, and there is no other location like it anywhere close.)

20. The story of them having quit was originally reported in just a single press article (that we’re aware of), in a niche diving magazine. But it’s affirmed by both Stanton and Volanthen in the National Geographic documentary, The Rescue, starting at 30:11. This inclusion was in part due to Raimund's (co-author here) insistence, though that's yet another story.

21. This was recounted, in a bit of lovely writing, by Maclean's. Their coverage also rightly notes that the SEALs had made some progress before them, which they deserve huge credit for. They weren't trained cave divers, and they made some rookie mistakes you'd expect, but they were brave and competent and they pushed the line forward.

22. Reymenants gave his thumbs up for this to another great unsung hero of the rescue, Ruengrit “Pae” Changkwanyuen, who went to the Thai authorities with it. The Brits mostly acknowledge having worked with the USAF to regain access, who weren't in charge of that area. Though it's certainly possible that final approval was granted by the Thais via confluence of requests. Per Stanton in a WhatsApp message to Reymenants: “Following our earlier discussion we tried to find you to accept working together forwarding the line beyond 3rd chamber. // We couldn’t find you but have obtained permission to proceed so are going into the cave this afternoon. We still see this as an assessment of conditions, will let you know when we exit.”

23. The gisty version is that Stanton never got along with Reymenants, in part due to what turned out to be misunderstandings (we cover some of these later). Stanton’s concerns were passed on to the British Cave Rescue Council, who went a bit theatrical in making it clear that Reymenants was now a persona non grata. From emails we were forwarded, Stanton's take was that this was "effective, but not necessarily how I would have addressed the issue." Reymenants graciously decided to bury the hatchet anyway, or at least tried to a few times. He was unsuccessful, for reasons only Stanton could clarify.

24. The Thai SEALs never stopped trying. But brave and capable as they were, they weren't used to cave diving. One of them later died in far better conditions, after the boys had already been found alive. The Thais never dived again after that (apart from those who were already with the boys in Chamber 9, who were the last ones out). If one had died during pathfinding, it's unlikely that the rescue would have continued. And even if the SEALs had made more safe progress, why would they invite the Brits back in? They had other very capable divers there who hadn't quit, who were happy to work with them. If the Brits were truly essential to the rescue, then their decision to leave was a death knell. (Though this wasn't entirely their fault. They just over-trusted the wrong guy!)

25. This chat was made public in his court case against Musk. See trial docs 167, pages 72-73 and 85-2, page 2. Though to be clear the issue is not just "he said a mean thing in a private chat", nor that it's a slur considered quite offensive to some locals. The issue is that it demonstrated how little respect he had for the SEALs, which bled over to the other Brits and hampered communication. (Though the other Brits had their own altercations with the Thais too, starting immediately upon their arrival, which they recount in their books.)

26. Reymenants had borrowed this climbing rope from the Brits while they were gone, just to show it to the Thais so they could order more. While it’s true that he didn’t wait around to ask permission, this hardly seems material. And it was an important move. Quoting Dr. Craig Challen, one of the Aussie rescue doctors/divers, from his co-authored book: "They had wisely decided to use the fatter climbing rope, stronger than regular line. They knew that quite a few people would be coming and going from the cave, and not just experienced cave divers. That climbing rope was sure to get an absolute flogging, but it wasn’t going to break no matter how many untrained amateurs yanked on it. If they’d used normal braided line, it would have already been in tatters or pulled loose for sure." Stanton also credits it on pg 144 of his book, along the same lines but also for its lower “entanglement hazard”.

27. To clear up a potential point of confusion, Reymenants later messaged Stanton asking him to pass on his thanks to "Vern" (Unsworth) for passing on this info. But he'd just confused Harper and Unsworth, which he later corrected. Harper confirmed to us (Raimund) that he was the one who talked to Reymanants, and Stanton (who had been walking with Harper and then left as this conversation started) affirmed this, both verbally and in writing.

28. Morris' wife is Thai, and had some level of local connections. Morris himself was an important cultural bridge for the Brits and the two Aussie doctors.

29. See trial doc 62, pages 20-25. This was presumably the widely-watched video of the sub during its pool testing in California, though we can’t say for sure. Unsworth affirmed that he didn't speak with anyone about it, and that this was his sole basis.

30. See trial doc 167, page 36.

31. Unless otherwise cited, all this is pulled from the Maclean's coverage, which we independently corroborated bits of. (We didn’t approach Jim Warny about his story, not wanting to entangle him. We think he did an excellent job under the circumstances.)

32. See Dr. Harris’s extended commentary on this here.

33. Quoting from the same interview as footnote 32, in which Dr. Harris speaks of a colleague who often gave seals ketamine: "[he] had one experience where the seal escaped before it fell asleep and was later seen swimming around with its nose out of the water without any worries at all, so protecting its own airway under ketamine anaesthesia, so that was the closest experience we could relate." The same article also references a WWII experiment where participants were doped with ether. The idea there was a bit different though, as it was about testing the lifejacket and whether it could support an unconscious soldier's head at a live-preserving angle. Different drug, different context, but we suppose a helpful clue.

34. It was left to the divers to re-administer the ketamine as needed, with anywhere between 3 and 6 top-ups per exit (the rescues got shorter each day). But this was the only rescue dive this particular diver was involved in as a lead, so he didn't have any experience with monitoring a boys' wakefulness to fall back on. In addition to missing the day 1 drills and prep meetings, he was also a late nomination for the day 3 lead slot, so it's also unclear how thorough his briefings were. Even though the coach was roughly the same size as the oldest boys, it seemingly would have helped for someone to tell this diver "hey, he's in that group that's going to metabolize the drugs faster, and you're better to preventatively dose them at chambers xyz than wait for it to be a problem". Dr. Harris also didn't remove the coach’s rings, which made it harder to get him to unclench the diver's air tube. The coach was only handed to this diver at Chamber 8, for reasons obscure to us, leaving the latter guessing as to his package.

35. Though Saman Gunan (may he rest in glory) was retired from the military, he was only 37 and in excellent physical shape. While we're not aware of any public autopsy documents, at least one newspaper cited "authorities" attributing hypothermia. The water was cold, and the boys' wetsuits were ill-fitting in many cases, making their risk even higher.

36. Quoting from 1:16:24 of the National Geographic documentary, The Rescue.

37. In fairness, this quote is from an earlier point in the timeline than his last request that Musk keep working on it. But, curiously, Stanton says in his book (page 329) that he’d “dismissed” the sub “with disappointment” after just seeing the initial pictures. If he’d “dismissed” it, why ask him to keep plugging away? Stanton kinda answers on page 330: “I told Elon to keep working because it couldn’t hurt (and because I was still thinking ahead, for possible use in future rescues), but I wasn’t relying on his team to provide us with anything useful.” Wut? If Musk’s team were so clueless as to forget life support systems, why set them up to fail again?

38. Unsworth was apparently able to look at the sub later in the summer of 2018, when it was included in a rescue exhibit at big mall in Bangkok. Reports and more detailed pictures from this presumably made their way to Stanton. But not all of the sub’s original components made the trip, as it was symbolic showcase, not an engineering presentation. It’s unclear what he might have learned from this. Of course, once Stanton took Unsworth's side in the Musk dispute, it would have obviously been very awkward to then approach the team at SpaceX. But his involvement was a choice. If he'd kept to his original line of "didn't see it, can't comment on it", sure, fair enough. But he went much further than that, and has yet to substantiate any criticism he's made.

39. There's a minor open question as to the sub’s exact diameter. In a tweet Musk said 31cm. In his emails to Stanton he said 35cm. A SpaceX engineer in their chat log (made public in the trial, see doc 81, pg. 75) said 14.8 inches, or 37.7cm. It could be interior vs exterior here, with some allowance for interior lining and/or the ballast fittings. We don’t know. But it's also neither here nor there, as the boy it was built for was tiny and would fit in all these dimensions, and the widest one wasn't any more of an obstacle for the restrictions in question.

40. As we cover more below, Stanton had asked (someone) that the SpaceX engineers send the sub to his room upon arrival, which never happened. We aren’t exactly sure why. It had been left with the Thai Navy Seals who greeted Musk, as the divers had already retired for the night. But if Stanton had told them on day 3 that it was needed or being considered, it certainly could have been summoned. The idea that it was actively hidden from him seems far-fetched. Musk and team left it with the people who were awake and around, and the Brits weren’t communicating much with said group directly.

41. They might be tempted to argue in the reverse that I (Jeremy) have also written a lot about Musk. And that's true, to a more limited extent. Do I have a reverse bias? I don't think so. But that's not really for me to judge, which is why I maintain a corrections policy. Not only do I explicitly encourage readers to call my attention to possible errors, I even pay them for it. It's systems that keep us honest. When I reached out to the NYT with concerns about this reporter's (co-written) piece about the Musk Foundation. I flagged the biggest issue in detail and told them I had a whole bag more. They disagreed with me on the main one, in a way I found flabbergasting, and opted against investigating the rest. This kind of thing is why, as part of my corrections policy, I started keeping a log of submitted requests attached to each piece I write. Even if I disagree about whether I got something wrong, readers deserve to hear both sides of the argument. Otherwise there's a limited cost to just repeatedly saying "eh, we think it was fine", as most readers will never see that challenge.

42. Apart from the four cave divers they lost in running off Reymenants (several of his colleagues left with him), they were also reluctant to use the remaining Euro/Canadian divers already there. They reportedly had to be talked into it by the USAF.

43. They originally planned for two divers per child, which they were talked out of by the Aussie anaesthetist and diver Dr. Harris. It was good they listened to him, so leadership points there. But also their plan was worse, so that counts too.

44. National Geographic does a great job of visualizing and explaining the problem in the link here. 

45. Footnote 10, attached to page 145: "In hindsight, we should have taken the time to reroute the line when we had the chance."

46. Though the tradeoff here was that pulling down the line to gain a few extra feet of room meant increased tension, increasing the risk of it "snapping" away. But ideally you just educate all the divers on both risks and leave them to choose which is more comfortable for them and for whatever gear they have. Or, you know, just fix the line trap.

47. While one could argue that this was also on the anaesthetist, Dr. Harris, who in his (co-authored) book said he meant to do it ("I have to see the state the kids are in. How big or little they are."), part of leadership is making sure that checklists are enforced. And anyway they never quite came up with a contingency for the one small kid they did know about.

48. Ruengrit “Pae” Changkwanyuen, who modified the not-famous-enough pink mask, which he used at his dive school for female divers with smaller faces.

49. It's also weird that they directed Musk towards the submarine instead of just (or also) saying "hey, can you make/secure a bunch of masks that are built like [insert make/model] but that fit smaller faces?" Musk had engineers spread across Thailand, and is famously very rich. While this type of mask isn't as standard for kids, retrofitting was always doable (which is exactly what Changkwanyuen did, on his own initiative, if to a less ideal mask, which saved the smallest boy's life)

50. Stanton and Volanthen had agreed between themselves to not record anything, until being overruled by the Thais on the day they found the boys. It seems that at least some other divers were then asked by the Brits to not film the rescue itself, though some did anyway.

51. Quoting from 5:53 of the National Geographic documentary, The Rescue.

52. Quoting Volanthen at 38:17 in National Geographic's The Rescue: "I was way beyond any sensible air margin." While their decision ended up being a good thing, it was risky, and one wonders what their response would have been had eg. Reymenants and Polejaka reached the kids via the same approach.

53. There was almost a week between reaching the boys and the rescue starting. None of those days were wasted per se, but losing half a day wasn't itself fatal.

54. Though the Brits laid by far the most line, some of it was through canal sections that mixed shallow dives and surface swimming. This meant more visibility, an easier ability to communicate, and more preservation of tank oxygen (ie. you can go longer distances). Also the final dive between Chambers 8 and 9 was described by Aussie diver/doctor Craig Challen in their book as "by far the nicest bit in the cave", "quite a pretty dive", and "a nice refresher before the main event". The only other really tricky part was just getting through the t-junction, which the Brits didn’t do either.

55. Stanton was, we're told, the first to suggest doping the kids, and won Dr. Harris over to it. He deserves full credit for that. It's impossible to know if a combo of eg. Reymenants and Harris would have reached the same decision. But it's certainly possible they wouldn't have, and that an alternate Plan A would have been used, with a worse risk profile.

56. Stanton admits this in pg 236 of his book. There are also references in the National Geographic documentary, The Rescue (at 54:40, 1:05:05, 1:06:15, and 1:07:42) that at least imply that the command structure was largely unaware of his doubts and believed the reading to be true. Though it seems that Staton may have told the British Cave Rescue Council, as they made public statements after about safely leaving the kids in there for the whole monsoon season, which wouldn't make sense if they believed oxygen levels had already dropped that quickly. This is symptomatic of the fractured communication lines and low trust.

57. As we recount in footnote 23, Stanton acknowledged that the concerns he raised to the British Cave Rescue Council about Reymenants ultimately led to the Keep Out signs that later littered the cave site and beyond. He termed the method “effective”, if not the way he’d have done it. But all save one (maybe two) of the concerns from this list (that we've been made aware of at least) have been fairly trivial to prove as colored by mistaken assumptions. The main exception being that Reymenants made one rescue dive alone, in poor conditions, which was hot-headed and fair to fully criticize.

58. We count ten incidents of this, separate from the rope borrowing incident covered above. While we won’t run down this full list here (too long and very insider baseball), we’d be happy to litigate them with Stanton if he wishes. That said, all follow a similar theme, which boils down to dick-measuring between the old pro and the young hotshot. Neither are short on ego when it comes to cave diving, and the threat and annoyance are always greater to him sitting on the throne. But this disparity comes out most sharply in how they speak of each other. Stanton provided us with a redacted copy of a private message between himself and Dr. Harris, wherein Stanton says “I think Ben has a personality disorder”. Stanton went so far as to tell me (Raimund) that I could simply go to Derek Anderson from the US Air Force for confirmation of how he perceived Reymenants. But I did, and Anderson had only positive things to say. Similarly, I was told to confirm with Mitch Torrel from the same unit that he had personally barred Reymenants from the rescue on July 3rd, right after the boys were found. Torrel didn't confirm this. Per Anderson, the USAF never attempted this, and lacked the authority to do so anyway. Only the Thais could at the time, and they liked Reymenants. We suspect the British Cave Rescue Council, when they heard Reymenants was returning, put up signs with his face on them, of their own volition. By this time the Brits were in charge of the rescue diving, and no one wished to rock the boat, so the USAF agreed to keep him off said team. Reymenants, at each point in their conflict, aimed for peace. He valued what Stanton brought, and was quick to tell him when he’d done his first successful pathfinding with Polejaka, even offering to extend his own cave access to have him and Volanthen brought back in. Whatever Reymenants's faults, it was asymmetric warfare.

59. Stanton is explicit about this in his book, on page 329. See “had failed”, “why hadn’t they thought of this”, etc. He saw pictures, of an early test unit, and decided. Upon deciding, he then adopted a policy of never publicly explaining. And privately of shifting goalposts.

60. Obviously the Unsworth trial complicated this. But Stanton had reportedly agreed prior to come to SpaceX to work on a v2, and he didn't deny this when we asked him about it. Did he just lose interest? Or did he get so swept up in Unsworth's agenda that he began looking for confirmation of partial judgments he previously said he couldn't comment on?

61. Stanton later accepted this while moving on to a new concern about CO2 buildup. We confirmed with SpaceX that they, very predictably, had accounted for this. If they didn’t so well enough, the onus would be on Stanton to explain.

62. It seems at least plausible to us that Unsworth had indeed encouraged the Thais to contact the British Cave Rescue Council (seems they never did), and that the latter in turn would have been likely to nominate Stanton and Volanthen. But it’s still curious why Harper himself, who was in daily contact with Unsworth, didn’t reach out to them. Or even to the BCRC with their names. (Stanton says he was in contact with the BCRC before reaching out to Harper. If they’d been contacted by Unsworth/Harper about Stanton, would they not have connected the two, saving Stanton his detective work?)

63. Stanton confirmed this in a WhatsApp chat (to Raimund) on October 25th, 2021, stating that "that assessment hadn’t come from us".

64. One native Thai speaker we talked to said that the emphasis on "fit" here might have been literal (in reference to cave restrictions) when considered alongside the hand motions Osatanakorn made while speaking. Unfortunately he isn't alive to clarify. Even if true though, as we cover elsewhere this was likely based on a misunderstanding about having to repeatedly move the sub through the chimney restriction. The Thai SEALS were mostly in the dark about the sub, and may never have been explained to them where and how it was meant to be used.

65. For example, the decision to allow the boys to be sedated came from much higher in the government.

66. See footnote 7.