I was thinking about this the other day. SpaceX takes investment money and uses it to do cool things. Boeing does cool things to give investors money. Obviously the sustainable spot is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.
As I understand it, the thing about Boeing is that it seems to have undergone a significant change of character, and every discussion I see of it traces it back to that merger. Its earlier record is actually slightly surprising to me, insofar as it really did seem to put pride in engineering quality far ahead of maximising profits. Hence its safety record was really very good.
Maybe it's just coincidental, and an accidental consequence of what just, by sheer chance, was the nature of its early management vs the corporate culture of McDonnel-Douglas, but also in that respect its previous nature seems very much a product of the post-war boom years, when such an attitude was possible, and the shift seems of-a-piece with the way _everything_ has gone downhill since the end of the boom.
Much of the rest of the corporate world seems to have abandoned that conscientious, pride-in-one's-work approach long ago, but it seems that because aircraft development is such a long-drawn out process (and aircraft purchases such a long-term investment), it's taken longer for that shift towards short-termism and profit maximisation and 'shareholder value' to have filtered through in the aeronautical sector.
Seems that in recent years Boeing has started behaving much more in the way I'd (cartoonishly?) imagined corporations to behave, whereas up till quite recently my expected image of them would have been unfair.