Chris Brown, a millionaire digital marketing executive, told British media outlets he changed his mind about taking part in the dive after coming to the conclusion that the operating company, OceanGate, had cut too many corners when it came to safety.

I found out they used old scaffolding poles for the subs ballastand its controls were based on computer game-style controllers, he told The Sun newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday.

If youre trying to build your own submarine you could probably use old scaffold poles. But this was a commercial craft. Eventually I emailed them and said, Im no longer able to go on this thing. I asked for a refund after being less than convinced.

Since the Titan went missing on Sunday, it has emerged that OceanGate had been repeatedly warned about several safety risks relating to the vessels construction, and that the submersibles pilot steers the sub with a $29.99 battery-powered gaming controller.

Brown said he had paid a deposit for the trip, which he had agreed to go on after a few beers with Hamish Hardingthe billionaire businessman currently aboard the Titanwhile the pair were vacationing on Richard Bransons private paradise, Necker Island.

At the time, the Titan was still being developed, and Brown and Harding paid a 10% deposit on the 80,000 ($102,000) voyage. Since then, the price of a ticket to explore the Titanic wreck aboard the Titan has risen to $250,000.

According to The Sun, Brown is a multimillionaire thanks to a successful digital marketing career. He reportedly met Harding on a 2016 trek to the South Pole alongside astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

While Brown said he was not one to shy away from risk, he explained that he had decided the risks were too high in this instance.

Fortune asked an OceanGate spokesperson about Browns comments, but received no response.

Chris Brown abandoned a trip on an #OceanGate sub following safety concerns.

He talks to #BBCWATO about the search for his friend, Hamish Harding. pic.twitter.com/msSSjXeVNl

The World at One (@BBCWorldatOne) June 21, 2023

In a separate interview with U.K. broadcaster ITV, he said all of those aboard the Titan will have looked at the risks and decided those were risks they wanted to take.

Every now and then something is going to go wrong, theres going to be accidents, theres accidents in the regular world as well but exploration tends to push those risks to the limit, he said.

He added that Harding would likely be keeping morale high on the Titan.

He will be extremely calm, hes well aware of risks in the exploration space, hes probably going through logically all the ways they can help themselves whilst making it as easy as possible to be found, Brown told ITV.

Hes got the perfect personality for such a situation, hes a very calming individual, a logical thinker. Hell be a calming influence on the other people on the vessel and am sure hell be doing everything he can to eke out that oxygen and keep morale and spirits up.

Still time left

Meanwhile, another would-be passenger who is now assisting with the rescue operation revealed this week that he had also canceled his place on the Titan at the last minute.

In a Facebook post on Monday, David Concannon, an Idaho-based trial lawyer whose areas of expertise include commercial litigation and wrongful death, said he was supposed to be on the dive but had to pull out to attend to another urgent client matter.

Concannon is also the founder of Explorer Consulting, which offers companies advice on the business of exploration. Its services include developing risk management plans, planning expeditionsincluding the chartering of ships, aircraft and other equipmentand providing on-site expedition leadership.

He said on Monday that the previous evening he had been called and asked to provide whatever assistance he could, to which he immediately agreed.

I know you are concerned for the safety of me and everyone at sea, but PLEASE STOP calling, texting, messaging, and sending all other forms of communication during this critical time, he urged well-wishers. You are interfering with more important communications that need to be made to resolve this situation as quickly and as safely as possible.

He has continued to provide updates from the frontlines of the rescue mission.

On Wednesday, he said there was still time left and rescuers continue to remain hopeful for the safe return of our friends and loved ones.

Concannon did not immediately respond to Fortunes request for comment.

Concannon served as director of The Explorers Club between 2002 and 2006. Hamish Harding currently serves as one of the organizations trustees.

According to his companys website, Concannon has been on three submersible dives to explore the Titanic shipwreck, and is one of only a handful of people to ever have made a deep submersible dive to a depth in excess of three miles.

Between 2010 and 2013, he organized and led the Apollo F-1 recovery project for Amazon founder Jeff Bezoss private exploration firm Bezos Expeditions, retrieving the remnants of engines from several Apollo lunar missions from depths of 14,000 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

In a separate post on Wednesday, Concannon shared a video from the Bezos Apollo project, noting that the recovery mission had gone deeper than the Titanic [shipwreck].

This is the type of equipment that needs to be on site but is not on site, he said.

Rescue teams are currently making their last desperate push to locate the Titan sub, which went missing off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, on Sunday with five people on board.

The crew, which includes Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet and Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, only had a four-day supply of emergency oxygen on the submersible when it set off to find the wreckage of the Titanic.

The U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday that more sounds had been heard in the search, but it remained unclear where they were coming from.

The resulting data dumps, dubbed the Twitter Files, served as a goodwill gesture to gain trust among conservative and anti-establishment voices and coax them back to the platform through a demonstration of transparency.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Musk said last month, after he had already open-sourced Twitters recommendation algorithm as further proof the company welcomed the public thoroughly scrutinizing it. 

Twitter employees have apparently taken his message too much to heart, however, as new CEO Linda Yaccarino now wants to crack down on internal leaks. Launching a company-wide mole hunt, employees have been encouraged to report to superiors anyone they have reason to believe may be passing on damaging information.

There is an organized way for us to be transparent, new Yaccarino hire Joe Benarroch told employees in an company-wide letter posted on Thursday. We just have to first focus on keeping our business actions confidential. 

Violations by these insiders can result in consequences that include everything from their immediate termination to criminal prosecution, he warned. 

If you suspect any employee is not protecting Twitters confidential information, please report it by submitting a ticket, Benarroch wrote in a letter to staff. If you need guidance or want to schedule training for your team, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

So far he appears to have had little success, as his comments were promptly leaked to tech blog Platformer. Its managing editor, Zoë Schiffer, has been a constant thorn in the side of Twitter, emerging as one of the foremost authorities to report on Musks ill-advised $44 billion investment.

Here is the full email for anyone who is wondering. I stand by my words. Great teams are built on TRUST. Were building something special at Twitter. The individuals who are leaking internal information cant be trusted and dont deserve to be a part of it. https://t.co/fYZmF7YVj5 pic.twitter.com/vnsZFVh2nE

Joe Benarroch (@benarroch_joe) June 22, 2023

Earlier this month, she and publication founder Casey Newton reported Twitter refused to pay its Google Cloud bills in the latest example of Musk not paying suppliers, partners and even employeespotentially giving them further motivation to leak internal news to the press. 

While Yaccarino reportedly has since patched up relations with Google and is honoring that particular contract, a Colorado judge ruled a delinquent Twitter can be evicted from its Boulder offices after failing to pay rent for three months. 

Maintaining security of sensitive information is a paramount task for virtually all businesses, since there are consequences beyond simply gifting valuable insight to ones competitors.

For example one of Musks other companies, Tesla, risks a fine as high as $3.3 billion after more than 100 gigabytes of documentsincluding personnel data on both customers as well as past and present employeeswere passed onto German business daily Handelsblatt.

Yet Musk has pitched his acquisition not as a traditional business endeavor but as a civic duty to humanity. Under his leadership, he claims Twitter will differentiate itself from mainstream competitors he branded media puppet-masters by elevating the platform to the worlds most trusted and transparent medium.

This altruistic marketing campaign partially backfired in May when Twitter admitted it censored content deemed by Turkish government to be harmful to the re-election chances of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who faced his first major political challenge in his 20 years ruling over the country (Musk claimed he had no other choice but to comply, an assertion disputed by some critics.)   

Upon hearing of Yaccarinos hire last month, the tycoons anti-establishment fans raised concerns that the spirit of accountability they believe Musk introduced could further be stifled by the former ad sales exec in her pursuit of more revenue.

Benarroch, who joined Twitter this month after overseeing communication strategy for the NBCUniversal division led by Yaccarino, did not respond immediately to a Fortune request for comment.

With Platformer letting the cat out of the bag, however, he chose to post the company-wide letter in full on the social media site.

Were building something special at Twitter, he wrote as a preface to the letter. The individuals who are leaking internal information cant be trusted and dont deserve to be a part of it.

Thats according to an analysis of 30 remote-capable jobs by Ringover, a cloud-based telecom provider. It found that hybrid workers also earned more than in-office workers, at 9.6%. The numbers come after combing through and comparing over 35,000 LinkedIn job postings for full-time, remote-capable roles.

The findings back up other research that reveals those working from home are higher earners. Remote workers are twice as likely to earn above the local median pay for non-remote workers in the same industry: 17% to 58% more, a study from payroll and benefits firm Gusto found last fall. And, per a global 2022 report by job site Hired, remote workers in tech outearn in-person workers in 15 of 17 global markets. The pay gap is due to a variety of reasons, from the ability to work for a more lucrative company even if its in another state to companies simply passing along the money they saved from reducing their real estate footprint. But the higher pay comes at the cost of intangible assetslike making connections and gathering critical feedback, which give in-office workers the upper hand.

Office managers stood to earn 31.7% more working remotely than they do in the officethe most out of any job Ringover analyzed. Public relations managers followed closely behind at 30.1%, along with customer service managers and data analysts. Ringover found only six in-office positions earning higher salaries than their remote counterparts: Junior web developers (who earn 12.52% more in-office), supply chain managers, UX designers, insurance underwriters, financial advisors, and sales assistants. 

A reason for the disparity, Ringovers researchers posited, could be that employers decided to pass along their savings from reducing office space to their workers. Indeed, companies can cut their real estate costs in half by moving to a hybrid arrangement, Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of commercial real estate company IWG, told Fortune last year. 

Plus, companies can save up to $11,000 per employee working two or three days remotely per week, a study by research firm Global Workplace Analytics found. That $11,000 comes from many sources, primarily reduced rent, upped productivity, and lessened absenteeism and turnoverall commonly attributed to flexible work arrangements.

Another explanation for higher pay: Remote workers can work for companies anywhere in the country that best align their skills, Gustos report pointed out. Also possible, per Gusto: Remote-capable jobs by definition often pay better, or workers with high-paying jobs moved to lower-income areas where their peers arent paid the same.

But for all the perks and pay remote work offers, it has some pretty sizable drawbacks.

Mentorship and collaboration get lost in the remote work shuffle

For one thing, most bossesintentionally or notfall victim to proximity bias, which describes preferential treatment for the workers who show up to their cubicles. That could mean bigger payouts and faster promotions over time, which add up quickly. 

The majority of workers in remote-capable jobs themselves said in a recent Pew Research report they felt that not being in the office limited their opportunities for mentoring and connecting. Remote workers also get significantly less feedback than in-office workers, a September 2022 working paper by economists from Harvard, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Iowa found. Lack of crucial redirection is another setback that could stymie career advancement. 

Thats especially true for newer or younger workers who need to learn the ropes. We know empirically that [new Salesforce employees] do better if theyre in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained, vocally pro-office Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in March. If they are at home and not going through that process, we dont think theyre as successful. 

Even extremely online Gen Zers can admit as much, indicating the strongest overall preference for working in an office in a Slack Future Forum report from earlier this year. Just under 90% of Gen Z workers who prefer the office say its because theyre most productive there.

But many remote workers would hang on to their flexibility even if it meant missing out on such benefitsor taking a pay cut. In numerous surveys over the past year, many workers indicated that theyd accept a nearly 20% drop in pay for a fully remote role. Flexibility and choice are clearly non-negotiables for many professionals, and employers will lose good staff if they limit remote options without a valid reason, Robert Half senior executive director Paul McDonald said last year. 

These kinds of trade-offs could gradually narrow the disparity between salaries for in-office roles and for remote roles, especially if employers begin consistently using remote capability as a means of negotiating lower salaries. Remote workers would likely hope otherwise; higher salaries and flexibility, after all, are a much better way of attracting top talent than fancy office spaces are.