The enshittification of boeing

From Shareholder Gospel to Broken Airplanes:
How "Enshittification" Captured American Industry—and Boeing

A viral concept from digital economics illuminates decades of strategic decay at America's flagship aerospace manufacturer—and traces its intellectual roots to the management revolution Jack Welch launched from Fairfield, Connecticut.

Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)

The corporate management doctrine pioneered by General Electric CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s—which subordinated engineering investment, workforce stability, and long-term product quality to short-term shareholder returns—migrated into Boeing through the 1997 McDonnell Douglas merger and has since produced 346 deaths in two preventable crashes, a $1.1 billion federal criminal settlement, cumulative post-2019 net losses exceeding $39 billion, long-term debt of $53 billion, and a cash burn of $14.3 billion in 2024 alone. Author and technologist Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification"—the predictable three-stage process by which monopoly-protected enterprises extract maximum value from captive stakeholders while degrading the underlying product—provides a precise analytical framework for understanding what happened to Boeing, and why the duopoly structure of commercial aviation may have extended the company's survival long past the point at which competitive market forces would have compelled reform.

In November 2022, Canadian author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow coined a word that entered the mainstream lexicon with unusual speed. "Enshittification," he wrote, names the process by which digital platforms predictably degrade: first subsidizing users to build lock-in, then extracting value from those users to benefit business customers, and finally extracting from everyone to maximize shareholder returns—after which, Doctorow observed with clinical brevity, "they die." The American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year for 2023; Australia's Macquarie Dictionary did the same for 2024. In October 2025, Doctorow published a full-length treatment in Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, arguing that platform decay is not a technology problem but a political-economic one: the predictable consequence of monopoly power freed from regulatory, competitive, and labor-based discipline.

Doctorow conceived the framework primarily for digital platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter. But his underlying mechanism is not native to software. It is, as political economist Henry Farrell noted in a widely cited extension of the concept, applicable to any enterprise that has accumulated sufficient market power to reduce the consequences of degrading its own product. Aerospace analysts, congressional investigators, and industry historians have increasingly converged on a conclusion that the enshittification framework makes analytically precise: Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company and America's single remaining manufacturer of large commercial aircraft, has been enshittifying for approximately thirty years. And the intellectual origin of that process traces directly to a management revolution launched in 1981 by a GE executive named John Francis Welch Jr.

The Welch Doctrine: Engineering a Different Kind of Machine

"On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy." —Jack Welch, Financial Times interview, 2009

When Jack Welch took the chairmanship of General Electric in April 1981, he inherited a company already in the early stages of being overtaken by structural economic forces: the post-war industrial boom was fading, Japanese and German manufacturing competition was intensifying, and GE's bloated bureaucratic structure was consuming capital that was producing diminishing returns. Welch's diagnosis was that the company suffered from excess complexity and insufficient accountability. His prescription became the template for a generation of American corporate management.

The elements of what business historians now call the Welch Doctrine were straightforward and ruthlessly implemented. Every GE business unit would be required to be number one or number two in its market, or face divestiture. Annual "rank and yank" performance reviews would identify and terminate the bottom ten percent of employees every year, regardless of absolute performance. GE Capital, the company's financial services arm, would be aggressively expanded until it contributed more than half of corporate earnings. And the company's primary metric of success would be its share price, evaluated quarterly. During Welch's tenure from 1981 to 2001, GE eliminated approximately 170,000 jobs—a scale of workforce reduction that had not yet entered the American corporate vocabulary when it began. Welch earned the nickname "Neutron Jack" for his ability to empty buildings while leaving the structures standing.

The short-term results were spectacular. GE's market capitalization grew from approximately $12 billion when Welch took over to $410 billion at his retirement, a return that Fortune magazine celebrated by naming him "Manager of the Century" in 1999. GE stock outperformed the broader market through the 1980s and 1990s, during which the S&P 500 itself rose twelvefold. Welch's methods were codified in his 2001 memoir and management manual, disseminated through Harvard Business School case studies, and propagated by a network of GE alumni who carried the doctrine into executive suites across American industry.

The intellectual foundation Welch operationalized had been established a decade earlier by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, whose 1970 New York Times essay argued that the sole social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits for shareholders. Before Welch, this was an academic proposition. After Welch, it was corporate operating procedure. As Roger Martin, former dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, told MIT Sloan Management Review: Welch was "an unsophisticated connoisseur of the idea of shareholder value maximization who was able to somewhat blindly and without reflection implement it in a powerful company." The assessment is corroborated by Welch's own 2009 recantation in the Financial Times, in which he called shareholder value maximization "the dumbest idea in the world—shareholder value is a result, not a strategy."

The recantation came too late. By 2009, the doctrine had spent nearly three decades embedding itself into American corporate incentive structures, executive compensation packages, and business school curricula. GE Capital's exposure during the 2008 financial crisis very nearly destroyed the parent company, revealing that the spectacular earnings Welch had reported from financial services had been purchased through leverage and risk-taking that the industrial earnings of GE's genuine manufacturing businesses could not ultimately backstop. GE's market capitalization, which had peaked at $600 billion in 2000, had fallen below $100 billion by 2018. The company broke itself into three separate entities in 2021 and ceased to exist as a unified enterprise—the final dissolution of what had once been America's most admired corporation.

GE Under Welch — Key Metrics of the Doctrine

• Market cap growth: $12B (1981) → $410B (2001 retirement)
• Jobs eliminated: ~170,000 between 1980 and 1985 alone
• GE Capital's share of earnings: grew to >50% of corporate profits
• Post-Welch peak market cap: ~$600B in 2000
• GE market cap by 2018: below $100B; company broken up in 2021
• CEO pay multiple vs. typical worker: ~20x in 1960s → ~380x by 2023 (U.S. aggregate)

The Merger That Changed Everything: McDonnell Douglas Buys Boeing With Boeing's Money

On August 1, 1997, Boeing completed its $16.3 billion all-stock acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, the St. Louis-based aerospace manufacturer whose commercial operations had been in extended decline. Boeing held approximately 60 percent of new commercial aircraft orders in 1996; McDonnell Douglas held roughly five percent. The acquisition was nominally a Boeing takeover. In practice, as Boeing's own engineers soon discovered, it was something else entirely.

McDonnell Douglas had itself been reshaped by the Welch doctrine through an earlier vector: Harry Stonecipher, who had served as CEO of Sundstrand Corporation and then of McDonnell Douglas, had spent his career in the Welch management tradition, having been deeply influenced by GE's approach during his years at Sundstrand. When the merger installed Stonecipher as Boeing's president—and later, from 2003 to 2005, as its CEO—the Seattle Times reported that both incoming Boeing CEO Phil Condit and Stonecipher were admirers of Jack Welch and "embraced the idea that any company has a single social responsibility: to increase its profits." Stonecipher explicitly stated his intentions, telling the Chicago Tribune: "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm."

The cultural collision was immediate and severe. Boeing had been, in the words of journalist Jerry Useem writing in Fortune in 2000, "an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines." Its engineers held organizational authority; technical decisions were made by people who understood the aerodynamics and materials science of what they were designing. The 777, which entered service in 1995 as the first large commercial aircraft designed entirely in digital three-dimensional modeling, was the product of this culture—delivered on schedule, within budget, and widely regarded as the finest large commercial transport ever built. The post-merger leadership characterized these engineers as "arrogant" and their culture as an obstacle to financial optimization. A federal mediator observing the cultural integration described the encounter as "hunter killer assassins" meeting "Boy Scouts."

In 2001, Condit and Stonecipher moved Boeing's headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, creating more than 1,700 miles of physical separation between the company's executive leadership and its manufacturing operations. Condit stated the intent explicitly: he wanted to separate corporate decision-making from "day-to-day operations." The effect was to ensure that Boeing's leadership would henceforth understand the company through financial abstractions rather than through direct knowledge of how airplanes are designed and built. Former Boeing CEO T. Wilson, who had overseen the company during its engineering golden era, offered a verdict that has since become the standard summary of what had occurred: "McDonnell Douglas has bought Boeing with Boeing's money."

Enshittification in Practice: The Buyback Years and the 737 MAX

"Boeing had spent a staggering $43 billion on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019—more than its total profits during that period—while allegedly skimping on safety and ignoring design flaws." —Green Alpha Investments analysis, 2024

The mechanism by which Welch-doctrine management enshittifies an industrial enterprise is precisely described by Doctorow's framework, applied to a physical manufacturing context. Stage one—investing to build lock-in—describes Boeing's legacy engineering investments through the 777. Stage two—extracting value to reward business customers (in Boeing's case, Wall Street analysts and institutional shareholders)—describes the post-merger period through 2019. Stage three—extracting from everyone including the core product itself— describes the 737 MAX program and its consequences.

The financial evidence for stage two is unambiguous. Between 2013 and 2019, Boeing repurchased $43.5 billion of its own common stock—an amount that exceeded the company's total profits during the same period. Including buybacks from the preceding decade, the total reached approximately $64 billion. These funds were not invested in new aircraft development, manufacturing quality systems, engineering talent, or supplier oversight. On December 17, 2018—less than two months after the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people—Boeing's board of directors ratified a 20 percent dividend increase and authorized a new $20 billion share repurchase program.

The product consequence of this financial orientation was the 737 MAX. When Airbus launched the re-engined A320neo in 2010, Boeing faced a competitive decision: develop a clean-sheet replacement for the aging 737 family, or re-engine the existing design. A clean-sheet aircraft program would cost an estimated $15-20 billion and require approximately a decade to certify—capital and time incompatible with the shareholder return priorities that had governed Boeing's capital allocation for fifteen years. The re-engine option was chosen.

The engineering problem was geometric. The 737's low ground clearance—a legacy of its 1960s origins, designed for airports without jetways—required the new, larger CFM LEAP engines to be repositioned forward and upward on the wing. This altered the aircraft's aerodynamic handling characteristics in ways that would require either a new type rating for pilots (which airline customers had been explicitly promised would not be required) or a software compensation system. Boeing chose the latter: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS.

MCAS, as the subsequent investigations documented in exhaustive detail, relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor rather than a redundant pair, activated more aggressively than pilots were informed, could not be overridden through standard control inputs, and was not disclosed to airlines or pilots in the aircraft's operational documentation. On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea, killing 189 people. On March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed near Addis Ababa, killing 157 more. The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide for twenty months.

The Federal Record: DOJ, FAA, and Congress Document the Failure

The legal and regulatory record of Boeing's corporate culture failure is now extensive, spanning multiple congressional investigations, federal criminal proceedings, and regulatory enforcement actions that together constitute the most comprehensive official documentation of industrial enshittification in American aerospace history.

In January 2021, the Department of Justice entered a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with Boeing under which the company paid $2.5 billion to resolve a criminal fraud charge related to deceiving the FAA during the 737 MAX certification process. A three-year probationary period was established. On January 5, 2024—two days before that probation was to expire—a door plug separated from an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 during a Portland-to-Ontario flight at approximately 16,000 feet. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board subsequently determined that four bolts required to secure the door plug had never been installed. Boeing informed the NTSB that it was unable to locate the installation records.

The DOJ declared Boeing in breach of the 2021 DPA in May 2024, citing the company's failure to "fully satisfy the requirement to create and foster a culture of ethics and compliance with the law in its day-to-day operations." Criminal prosecution proceedings followed. In July 2024, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the FAA, but the presiding federal judge, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, rejected the plea agreement citing concerns about the selection process for an independent corporate monitor. On May 23, 2025, the DOJ and Boeing reached a non-prosecution agreement under which Boeing admitted to conspiring to obstruct FAA oversight and agreed to pay or invest more than $1.1 billion, including a criminal monetary penalty of $487.2 million, the statutory maximum. The charges were formally dismissed by Judge O'Connor on November 7, 2025, though families of victims filed petitions with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the dismissal. As of the publication of this analysis, those petitions remain pending.

Congressional scrutiny ran in parallel. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), held a series of hearings in 2024 that produced some of the most direct official testimony about Boeing's culture since the MAX crashes. In April 2024, Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour testified that manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 Dreamliner and 777 programs had compromised structural integrity, describing fuselage assembly gaps that workers addressed by applying excessive force—"people jumping on pieces of the airplane to get them to align"—and alleging that management instructed him to suppress his concerns. Salehpour testified that shims required at structural joints were absent in 98.7 percent of cases where they were required. A separate whistleblower, quality assurance investigator Sam Mohawk, alleged that Boeing was losing track of hundreds of nonconforming parts and that he had been directed by supervisors to conceal evidence from FAA inspectors. Mohawk filed an OSHA complaint alleging retaliation.

Senator Blumenthal summarized the subcommittee's findings in terms that translate directly to the enshittification framework: "This is a culture that continues to prioritize profits, push limits, and disregard its workers. A culture where those who speak up are silenced and sidelined while blame is pushed down to the factory floor. A culture that enables retaliation against those who do not submit to the bottom line."

FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker testified before the subcommittee in September 2024, acknowledging that the agency had placed full-time, in-person inspectors at each major Boeing production facility and capped 737 MAX production while the manufacturing quality program was evaluated. The FAA's April 2024 special audit had identified multiple violations of quality procedures on the 737 MAX production lines. The agency simultaneously mandated that Boeing implement a Safety Management System, formally acknowledging that Boeing's existing quality assurance structure was inadequate. A 30-year Boeing quality manager who had raised concerns about the company's South Carolina manufacturing facility—and who had been seeking damages through the legal system for alleged retaliation—died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in March 2024 while his case was pending. His death was noted by Senator Blumenthal at the June 2024 hearing featuring testimony from CEO Dave Calhoun.

Boeing — Federal Legal & Regulatory Timeline (2021–2026)

• Jan. 2021: DOJ Deferred Prosecution Agreement; Boeing pays $2.5B, admits to misleading FAA on MCAS
• Jan. 5, 2024: Door plug blowout, Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9; NTSB finds four bolts missing; Boeing cannot produce installation records
• Apr. 2024: Senate PSI hearing; Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour testifies to structural assembly shortcuts on 787 and 777
• May 2024: DOJ declares Boeing in breach of 2021 DPA; FAA imposes full-time inspectors at all major Boeing facilities; production cap on 737 MAX imposed
• Jun. 2024: Senate PSI hearing; CEO Calhoun testifies; additional whistleblowers allege concealment of defects from FAA
• Jul. 2024: Boeing agrees to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge; federal judge later rejects plea agreement
• Sep. 2024: FAA Administrator Whitaker testifies before Senate; details ongoing oversight regime
• May 23, 2025: DOJ non-prosecution agreement; Boeing pays $487.2M criminal penalty (statutory maximum); total obligation >$1.1B
• Nov. 7, 2025: Criminal charges formally dismissed; victims' families file Fifth Circuit petition; briefing schedule established

The Financial Reckoning: What Shareholder Primacy Actually Cost

The financial consequences of Boeing's management doctrine are now visible in figures that would have been inconceivable at the company's peak. Between the second 737 MAX crash in March 2019 and the end of 2024, Boeing accumulated net losses exceeding $39 billion. Long-term debt reached $53 billion. The company burned through $14.3 billion in cash during 2024 alone—a figure that dwarfed the $9 billion annual share buybacks that preceded the MAX crisis. Boeing raised $22 billion in equity in late 2024 to stave off a junk credit rating, diluting existing shareholders by approximately fifteen percent. By October 2024, new CEO Kelly Ortberg told investors: "We're clearly at a crossroads. The trust in our company is eroded. We're saddled with too much debt."

Melius Research analyst Scott Mikus, writing in January 2025, offered a verdict that frames the strategic dimension of the financial disaster: "Boeing has already lost the 2020s to Airbus. If it wants a shot at winning the 2030s or 2040s, it will need a clean-sheet aircraft program." No such program has been launched. The last genuinely new Boeing airframe—the 777—entered service in 1995, before the McDonnell Douglas merger, before the Stonecipher cultural transformation, and before the buyback era. The 787 represented genuine materials innovation but was operationally and financially catastrophic, delayed three years by the consequences of excessive outsourcing that severed the feedback loop between design engineering and manufacturing knowledge. The 737 MAX is a 1960s design with updated engines. The 777X is a derivative of the 1995 design with new engines and folding wingtips; its first delivery, to occur no earlier than 2026, will close a thirty-year gap in clean-sheet commercial aircraft development at Boeing.

The arithmetic of what the buyback era cost is straightforward. The $43.5 billion Boeing spent repurchasing its own shares between 2013 and 2019 exceeded the total estimated development cost of a clean-sheet narrowbody aircraft program. Had that capital been invested in a genuine 737 replacement rather than in stock price manipulation, the competitive and safety conditions that produced the MAX crisis might never have existed. Instead, the capital was deployed to enrich shareholders and executives in the short term while consuming the engineering and manufacturing capital that constituted Boeing's genuine long-term competitive asset.

The Enshittification Framework Applied: From Platform Decay to Aerospace Decay

Doctorow's framework was developed to describe digital platforms, but its underlying mechanism requires only three conditions that Boeing demonstrably met: sufficient market power to reduce competitive discipline (the commercial aviation duopoly), sufficient lock-in to reduce customer switching costs (airline fleet commitments measured in billions of dollars and decades), and management incentives aligned to short-term extraction rather than long-term value creation (executive compensation tied to share price rather than engineering outcomes).

Applied to Boeing, the three stages map precisely. Stage one: decades of engineering-led investment building genuine product superiority—the 707, 747, 757, 767, 777—that created customer lock-in, brand equity, and regulatory relationships that constituted genuine competitive moats. Stage two: extraction from that accumulated asset base to reward institutional shareholders, carried out through the post-merger shift from engineering authority to financial management authority, the headquarters relocation, the 787 outsourcing that sacrificed manufacturing knowledge for short-term cost reduction, and the buyback programs that consumed capital needed for product renewal. Stage three: degradation of the product itself, manifest in the MCAS design choices, the manufacturing quality failures documented by multiple whistleblowers, the falsification of inspection records, and the institutional concealment of known defects from federal regulators.

The duopoly dimension is critical to understanding why Boeing's enshittification advanced as far as it did without triggering the terminal phase Doctorow describes. In a competitive market—or even in an industry with meaningful new-entrant possibilities—the consequences of product degradation would have expressed themselves as market share loss long before they expressed themselves as criminal prosecution and $39 billion in losses. Southwest Airlines has its entire fleet committed to 737-family aircraft; transitioning to Airbus would cost billions and require years. American Airlines, United Airlines, and every other major Boeing customer faces similar switching costs. The oligopoly structure that enabled Boeing's financial engineering to continue through thirty years of strategic mismanagement is the same structure that allowed the enshittification to advance to a degree that would have been impossible in a genuinely competitive market.

The 2025 study in the British Journal of Industrial Relations by Maffie and Hurtado extended Doctorow's framework to labor relations, arguing that platform enshittification describes not only consumer-facing degradation but a broader socio-economic process that reshapes labor markets. Boeing's thirty years of workforce restructuring—the elimination of engineering authority, the preference for financial and managerial skills over technical depth, the outsourcing of manufacturing knowledge to suppliers, and the systematic retaliation against workers who raised quality concerns—fits this extended framework precisely.

The Recovery Question: Can Enshittification Be Reversed?

Doctorow's October 2025 book argues, against the grain of his own diagnostic pessimism, that enshittification is not inevitable because it results from policy choices rather than structural inevitabilities. His prescriptions are primarily regulatory: restoring competitive discipline through antitrust enforcement, mandating interoperability to reduce switching costs, and rebuilding labor power to reestablish worker-based discipline on corporate conduct. Applied to Boeing, the analog prescriptions are more complex because the barriers to competitive entry in commercial aviation are genuinely structural rather than policy-created, and because the institutional knowledge that Boeing has consumed over thirty years cannot be rebuilt through regulatory mandate.

New CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took the helm in August 2024, has taken several actions that represent a departure from the extractive management culture his predecessors institutionalized. He relocated his office to Washington State, reversing the 2001 decision that separated leadership from manufacturing. He has articulated a "fix first, produce later" philosophy that explicitly prioritizes engineering quality over financial metrics. Third-quarter 2025 results showed positive free cash flow for the first time in years, and the FAA approved an increase in 737 MAX production to 42 units per month in October 2025. Whether these early indicators represent genuine cultural reversal or tactical financial management remains to be established over a sustained period.

What recovery requires—and what the financial record suggests will take years to achieve—is the rebuilding of engineering authority as the primary decision-making structure at Boeing, the restoration of manufacturing knowledge that was outsourced or discarded during the 787 program and its successors, the launch of a genuine new aircraft program that demonstrates Boeing's ability to execute clean-sheet design, and a sustained period of quality performance that rebuilds regulatory confidence. The investment required for a new narrowbody program alone—a genuine 737 replacement that Airbus has already been studying for the next generation—is estimated by industry analysts at $15-20 billion, against a balance sheet carrying $53 billion in debt and a credit rating one notch above junk.

The irony that Doctorow's framework illuminates is structural and sharp. The $64 billion Boeing spent on share buybacks between 2003 and 2019—capital that produced no aircraft, employed no engineers, and created no competitive advantage—is roughly equivalent to four clean-sheet aircraft development programs. The shareholder value that those buybacks were designed to create has been more than consumed by the losses, liabilities, and reputational damage that followed. The doctrine that promised to maximize returns for shareholders has, over a thirty-year horizon, destroyed more value than it created—for shareholders, for workers, for customers, for regulators, and for the 346 people who died in two preventable accidents.

Jack Welch understood this, eventually. He said as much in 2009, too late for the insight to alter the trajectories it had set in motion. Boeing is now paying a price that confirms his recantation in the most concrete terms available: fuselages assembled without required bolts, whistleblowers silenced, regulators deceived, families destroyed, and a once-incomparable engineering enterprise struggling to demonstrate that it can still reliably build the airplanes it has always been trusted to build.

Verified Sources & Formal Citations

1. Doctorow, C. (2022, November). "Enshittification." Pluralistic. Original coinage of the term. Expanded in: Doctorow, C. (2025). Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. Verso Books. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification
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3. Doctorow, C. (2024, January 30). "My McLuhan lecture on enshittification." Medium. https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc
4. Maffie, M. and Hurtado, D. (2025). "Platform Decay and Labour Conditions." British Journal of Industrial Relations. (Cited in Wikipedia "Enshittification" article, March 2026.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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31. Wartzman, R. (2017). The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America. PublicAffairs. (Cited in Marketplace analysis above; documents GE workforce reductions of ~170,000.)
32. Gelles, D. (2022). The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy. Simon & Schuster. (Primary scholarly treatment of the Welch doctrine and its propagation.)
33. Washington Monthly. (2025, October 30). "The Cory Doctorow Doctrine." Review/analysis of Enshittification. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/10/30/the-cory-doctorow-doctrine-enshittification/
34. CNN Business. (2024, October 23). "Boeing CEO says the company must fundamentally change as losses surge." (Ortberg: "We're clearly at a crossroads.") https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/investing/boeing-losses/index.html
35. Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." New York Times Magazine. (Foundational text of shareholder primacy doctrine.)

Aviation Week Analysis Desk — March 2026 • This analysis is prepared for informational purposes. All sources are publicly available. Reproduction requires attribution.