I was recently reading about Boeing, and all of its latest troubles with its aircraft. Being someone who flies across the country often, especially from NYC to SF and back, I had to investigate a bit more.
The first thing I did was go look at who the CEO is. In my mind, I imagined it would be a engineer or scientist or pilot. Perhaps even someone from the Air Force. After all, these jets are soaring at hundreds of miles per hour weighing 100,000+ pounds in the skies above us, flying at all hours. This is a really big deal to run a company like this. To my surprise, the CEO of Boeing is a former Blackstone portfolio manager. Wait… what? Yes, really:
Private equity experts are masters of spreadsheets, sending emails, and making PowerPoints. They look at numbers and try to make those numbers make them more money. Are they really building anything? Unlikely. Are they doing financial engineering on a spreadsheet that weaves around our tax code and creates “efficiencies”? Absolutely. I am not sure how any of that, at all, connects to airplanes.
Thus, I have a question for all the Boeing investors out there: why is a spreadsheet master running the most important airplane company on Earth?
It’s possible that the board thought he would help their stock price so they could all get massive pay packages. Oops!
If I made my dog my head chef, and asked it to make eggs, well it won’t make eggs and it won’t be my head chef just because it’s wearing a cool hat.
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