The mother of the 19-year-old killed aboard the Titan submersible said the plan had been for her to accompany her husband on a trip to see the wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the sea. She "stepped back" from going on the trip because of her son's enthusiasm, Christine Dawood told the BBC, and he boarded the ill-fated craft carrying a Rubik's Cube and dreaming of setting a world record. He and his father, Shahzada Dawood, died when the vessel imploded. Christine Dawood told the news outlet the original plan was for her to accompany her husband on the underwater trek roughly 12,500 feet below the surface to view the Titanic. The original trip, however, was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old who died aboard OceanGate's Titan submersible last week, hoped to set the world record for solving a Rubik's Cube in the deep ocean, his mother said Monday. Dawood and his father, Shahzada, had finished the process of applying to the Guinness World Records and entered the submersible equipped with a camera to record the achievement. Christine Dawood and her daughter remained aboard the Polar Prince mother ship while the submersible descended toward the wreck of the Titanic earlier this month, she told the BBC in an interview. Christine spoke of the moment the crew of the Prince informed her they had lost communications with the submersible. "I didn't comprehend at that moment what it meant – and then it just went downhill from there," she said.

A former OceanGate Expeditions customer who took a trip to see the Titanic wreckage two years ago described the dive as a "kamikaze operation." An international search and rescue operation is ongoing for five crew members on OceanGate's Titan sub, which went missing Sunday on a planned deep sea tourist expedition. Arthur Loibl, a retired German businessman and adventurer who went on the same trip in 2021, shared his experience with OceanGate in an interview with The Associated Press. "You have to be a little bit crazy to do this sort of thing," Loibl said. He explained that the idea of touring the Titanic wreckage came to him on a trip to the South Pole in 2016.

Based in New York, Grafiti was co-founded by former journalist Farhan Mustafa and venture advisor Akbar Dawood. Dawood is an advisor to Untethered Labs. Mustafa, who also has a background in data analytics, said he came up with the idea for Grafiti.io while working as a consultant and producer for the Al Jazeera Media Network. Frustrated by the drudgery of combing through news stories looking for charts and graphs while reporting for Al Jazeera in the Middle East, Mustafa wanted a tool that would surface visual information onto a single page, instead of having to go into each story to see the visuals. Grafiti has a platform that does that.