This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take from this debacle, especially as Musk’s own manufacturing lines are putting out complete garbage for very similar actual reasons as Boeing: excessive financialization exerting pressure on the engineering process.
> excessive financialization exerting pressure on the engineering process.
This is a quasi-Marxist analysis. All of Boeing and Tesla's competitors are exposed to the same "financialization", whatever that is, yet it's Boeing with the problem. Tesla meanwhile has focused on developing and shipping cutting or bleeding edge tech, their quality issues aren't due to management but because the thing they're trying to do is inherently very difficult.
You can argue they shouldn't have shipped their autopilot features, but not that it has defects due to bad manufacturing practice. The defects are due to it being a hard and new problem. Making sure bits of the plane don't fall off mid-flight is though not due to pushing the tech boundary, it's the opposite, the 737 MAX exists specifically to avoid introducing anything new.
1. I wasn’t referring to Autopilot. I was referring to e.g. panel gaps, which is a very solved problem.
2. Financialization is a specific term. Look it up if you don’t know what it means. Here’s a hint: “Calhoun [Boeing CEO] has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.”
What’s the path for an accountant to end up leading an aerospace engineering firm? That’s the effect of financialization.
Compare to Airbus: “Guillaume began his career in 1992 as a flight-test engineer for the Eurocopter Tiger helicopter in the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA).”
Toyota’s CEO: mechanical engineer.
Subject to the same external pressures maybe, yet some companies somehow didn’t end up ruled by an accountant. You can have every company subject to a bull market yet some do better than others. It’s not very confusing.
