'Mr. Titanic' Paul-Henri Nargeolet Has a Pretty Substantial Net Worth

As one of the five people who are on board the missing Titanic submarine that has gained so much attention recently, many want to know more about Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who's also known as "Mr. Titanic" because of his expertise on the sunken vessel. Paul-Henri had made more than 35 dives down to the Titanic wreckage before this one, in part because his company RMS Titanic, Inc. owns the salvage rights to the vessel.

Paul-Henri's business ventures both through RMS Titanic and through other business ventures, and given the net worth of some of the other people on board this missing submarine, many also wanted to know exactly what Paul-Henri's net worth was.

Paul-Henri's net worth is estimated to be roughly $1.5 billion, although it's hard to find an exact figure. Paul-Henri currently works as the research director of RMS Titanic, and he has been instrumental in substantial discovers related to the wreck. That includes the discovery of an “extraordinarily biodiverse abyssal ecosystem on a previously unknown basalt formation near the Titanic."

Prior to his work on the Titanic, Paul-Henri spent more than two decades working for the French Navy, and was interested in diving even before he joined. During those two decades, he was a mine-clearing diver, a deep sea diver, and a submarine pilot. He then joined IFREMER, a publicly funded French research institute, where he did work related to the earliest excavations of the Titanic site in the late 1980s.

His first dive down to the Titanic was in 1987, about two years after it was first discovered.

“It was a pretty unforgettable moment,” Paul-Henri said during a recent interview of his first dive. He just published a book last year about the Titanic. He said the submarine's crew was chatty until they reached the wreck.

“For the next 10 minutes there wasn’t a sound in the submarine," he said.

“We didn’t know at that time that we would return several times, and that I would return as often as I have been able to,” he added.

The Titanic has only become more of an object of fascination in the decades since Paul-Henri took his first dive down to it, in part because of James Cameron's blockbuster film of the same name.

Now, as many follow the search for Paul-Henri and the other passengers on board the submarine, it's worth remembering that Paul-Henri understood the risks of his dives better than most, and kept going back down anyway.