A close friend of Stockton Rush, who was operating the Titan sub when it imploded last month, compared the vessel to a “mouse trap for billionaires” and accused the OceanGate CEO of murdering his passengers in an interview with “60 Minutes Australia.”

Karl Stanley — a submarine operator himself who rode on the Titan during a test-run in the Bahamas in 2019 — said that “Stockton was designing a mouse trap for billionaires,” and suggested that he was happy to risk the lives of his affluent passengers to go down in history.

When asked if Rush had a “death wish,” Stanley responded: “The only question is, ‘When?’ He was risking his life and his customers’ lives to go down in history. He’s more famous now than anything else he would’ve done.”

“He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with, and who was the last person to murder two billionaires at once, and have them pay for the privilege?” Stanley asked during the segment that aired Monday.

When asked what he believed the fatal flaw of the Titan was, Stanley said: “There’s no doubt in my mind that it was the carbon fiber tube that was the mechanical part that failed.”

He even thought he heard that part cracking when he accompanied Rush on a test dive of the Titan in 2019 off the coast of the Bahamas.

During the two-hour, 12,000-foot descent, Stanley told “60 Minutes” that he recalled hearing “loud, gunshot-like noises…every three to four minutes.”

“That’s a heck of a sound to hear when you’re that far under the ocean in a craft that’s only been down that deep once before,” he added.

Stanley then sent Rush a series of heated calls and emails raising concerns that the noise was actually the Titan’s hull cracking.

“There is an area of the hull that is breaking down. It will only get worse,” he wrote to Rush in 2019, and candidly told his friend that he had a severe lack of operating experience, “60 Minutes” revealed.

“I literally painted a picture of his wrecked sub at the bottom [of the ocean] and even that wasn’t enough,” Stanley added.

A video animation of Titan’s “catastrophic implosion” posted to YouTube earlier this month also showed that the five passengers aboard the SUV-sized vessel met their tragic end when the sub’s carbon fiber make-up crumbled under the water pressure.

Titan is believed to have imploded on June 18 — less than two hours into its dive to the Titanic at a depth of about 5,500 feet in the North Atlantic.

A video animation of Titan’s “catastrophic implosion” posted to YouTube earlier this month also showed that the five passengers aboard the SUV-sized vessel met their tragic end when the sub’s carbon fiber make-up crumbled under the water pressure.

If the sub made it to the famed wreck, it would have to withstand immense pressure at a depth of 12,500 feet below the surface, which is about 400 times greater than the pressure on land, the animation said.

All five voyagers aboard the submersible were killed.

Stanley’s “60 Minutes Australia” interview wasn’t the first time that Rush was accused of recklessly leading what he knew would be a fatal voyage.

Patrick Lahey, the president of Triton Submarines and a friend of late Titan passenger Paul-Henri Nargeolet, accused Rush of being on a “predatory” hunt for wealthy clientele.

“He could even convince someone who knew and understood the risks … it was really quite predatory,” Lahey told The Times.

Another man, Jay Bloom — who nearly booked passage on the doomed Titan sub but pulled out over safety concerns — said that Rush “wasn’t really looking to build a tourism business to the Titanic,” and only brought passengers along to “finance his scientific observation.”

“He wanted to research and document the decay of the ship over time,” Bloom said, noting that “multiple dives to the site costs a lot of money.”