In the weeks after the second 737 MAX crash — Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, March 2019, five months after Lion Air Flight 610 — regulators grounded Boeing's best-selling airplane worldwide. Inside the company, one program stopped almost immediately, and it wasn't an airplane program. Boeing stopped buying back its own stock.

It was a quiet end to an extraordinary run. Between 2013 and early 2019, Boeing's own SEC filings show the company spent $43.4 billion repurchasing its own shares [1][2]. Over the same years, it spent roughly half that on research and development — the budget that designs airplanes. This article is about what that ratio meant at Boeing, what it means anywhere, and why we score it.

A stock buyback (or share repurchase) is a company using its cash to buy its own shares on the open market. Fewer shares outstanding means each remaining share represents a larger slice of the company, which mechanically raises earnings per share — the number many executive bonus plans are tied to — without the company selling one more product or improving one more process.

Buybacks are legal, disclosed, and extremely common. But they are not timeless. For most of the twentieth century, a company aggressively bidding up its own stock risked liability for market manipulation. That changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Rule 10b-18, which — in the SEC's own words — provides that an issuer "will not be deemed to have violated" the anti-manipulation provisions of the Exchange Act "solely by reason of the manner, timing, price, or volume of its repurchases" if it stays within the rule's safe-harbor conditions [8][9]. The modern buyback era dates from that rule change.

The scale it reached is documented. Economist William Lazonick, writing in Harvard Business Review, examined the 449 S&P 500 companies publicly listed from 2003 through 2012: they spent 54% of their earnings — $2.4 trillion — buying back their own stock, with dividends absorbing another 37%. As Lazonick put it, that left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees [7].

Defenders make a fair point: if a company genuinely has no better use for its cash, returning it to shareholders — who can reinvest it elsewhere — beats hoarding it or spending it badly. The question is never whether buybacks are categorically evil. The question is what a company chooses not to fund in the years it is spending billions on its own shares. Which brings us to Boeing.

For most of its history, Boeing was run by engineers and famous for engineering conservatism — the company that bet itself on the 747 and won. Journalist Peter Robison's account of the MAX era, Flying Blind, traces how that culture changed: the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas installed leadership steeped in cost-cutting; the headquarters moved from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, physically separating executives from the factory floor; and a generation of leaders trained in Jack Welch's General Electric — including CEO Jim McNerney, a direct Welch protégé — brought GE's shareholder-first playbook to an airplane company [6].

The playbook's signature move: when Airbus launched the fuel-efficient A320neo in 2010 and began winning orders from Boeing's most loyal customers, Boeing chose not to design a new airplane. It bolted bigger engines onto the 1960s-vintage 737 airframe instead — faster to market, far cheaper, and compatible with the priority of returning cash to shareholders. That re-engined airplane became the 737 MAX.

The cheap choice had a physical problem: the new, larger engines did not fit. The 737 was designed in the 1960s to sit low to the ground, and as the House investigation found, "the larger engines had to be mounted further forward and higher up on the wings in order to maintain sufficient ground clearance" — changes that "altered the aerodynamics of the aircraft," making it "more likely to pitch upward during certain flight conditions, putting it at risk of entering a potentially dangerous stall" [3]. Boeing's answer was software: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, MCAS, added "to help counter the tendency of the aircraft to pitch up" and preserve commonality with the previous-generation 737 NG [3][5].

Commonality was the business plan. Boeing marketed the MAX on the promise that 737 pilots could step into it with no simulator training — keeping differences training to "Level B" (no simulator) was, in the House report's words, "a key Boeing objective of the 737 MAX program" and "a central pillar" of it. The promise had a price tag: Boeing was contractually obligated to discount each MAX it delivered to Southwest Airlines by at least $1 million if the FAA required simulator training — an exposure the report put at $200 to nearly $400 million [3]. A brand-new flight-control system that pilots had to train on would have broken that promise. So MCAS was designed to be invisible: it relied on a single angle-of-attack sensor, and — hours after its final redesign was approved — Boeing sought, and the FAA approved, the removal of any reference to MCAS from the flight crew operations manual [3].

Congressional investigators tied all of it back to the same pressure. The House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee's final report on the MAX found: "There was tremendous financial pressure on Boeing and the 737 MAX program to compete with Airbus' new A320neo aircraft. Among other things, this pressure resulted in extensive efforts to cut costs, maintain the 737 MAX program schedule, and avoid slowing the 737 MAX production line" [3].

Here is what the priority shift looks like in Boeing's own audited financial statements. Every figure below comes from the consolidated cash flow and income statements in Boeing's 10-K filings on SEC EDGAR [1]:

From 2014 onward, Boeing spent more on buybacks than on research and development every single year. At the 2017 peak, the ratio was nearly three to one: $9.2 billion repurchasing shares, $3.2 billion developing aircraft. Across the six years, buybacks ($40.8 billion) ran double the entire R&D budget ($20.5 billion) — and adding dividends brings total shareholder payouts to $57.0 billion [1]. Boeing bought back a final $2.7 billion in early 2019 before the grounding stopped the program, closing the 2013–2019 total at $43.4 billion [2].

A note on a widely-cited number: Robison's book and much subsequent commentary put the figure at "$41.5 billion" for 2013–2018. We could not reproduce that number from the 10-K cash flow statements, which sum to $40.8 billion for those years. We cite what the filings say.

To be precise about what we are and are not claiming: buybacks did not crash two airplanes. The House committee was explicit that the MAX disasters were "not the result of a singular failure, technical mistake, or mismanaged event" but the "horrific culmination" of faulty engineering assumptions, management opacity, and failed oversight [3]. The full story of how MCAS — the invisible system described above — was progressively strengthened during development without corresponding safeguards, and how its certification failed, is told definitively by The Seattle Times' Pulitzer-winning reporting [4][5].

What the buyback numbers show is something the investigation kept encountering from the other direction: where the company's priorities actually were during the years the MAX was designed, certified, and rushed down the production line. In a November 2016 internal Boeing survey cited in the House report, 39% of responding Boeing engineers authorized to act on the FAA's behalf reported experiencing "undue pressure" [3]. The committee's final observation reads like an epitaph: "Boeing has gone from being a great engineering company to being a big business focused on financial success" [3].

The capital-allocation record and the investigative record describe the same company. One is written in dollars, the other in findings — and the dollars are disclosed, audited, and checkable by anyone with an internet connection.

NOligarchy's scoring model includes a Wealth Extraction pillar, and buybacks are one of its inputs — measured as buyback spending relative to company revenue, from the same XBRL financial data companies file with the SEC. We score them for exactly the reasons the Boeing case illustrates:

There is a fourth reason, and it is the reason buybacks belong in a pillar called Wealth Extraction: the gains flow to whoever owns the shares, and stock ownership in America is extraordinarily concentrated. The Federal Reserve tracks this directly. As of early 2026, the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households hold 87% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares; the top 1% alone hold half. The entire bottom half of U.S. households holds about 1% [10]. About 62% of Americans own at least some stock, mostly through retirement accounts [11], but owning some stock and owning the stock market are very different things. So when a company routes billions to shareholders instead of wages, prices, or products, there is no mystery about where the money goes: 87 cents of every dollar lands in the portfolios of the wealthiest tenth of American households, and about one cent reaches the bottom half [10].

The people who decide to buy back stock are also, personally, on the receiving end. Executive pay is dominated by stock-based instruments — Lazonick's study found the 500 highest-paid U.S. executives averaged $30.3 million in 2012, with 42% of that from stock options and 41% from stock awards — and, as he notes, "in the short term buybacks drive up stock prices" [7]. At Boeing, CEO Jim McNerney was paid $23.3 million in 2013 and $28.9 million in 2014 — the years the buyback program ramped from $2.8 billion to $6 billion — with the large majority delivered in stock options, restricted stock, and awards tied to total shareholder return, all of which rise with the share price that buybacks support. Boeing's own 2014 proxy statement lists the newly authorized $10 billion of buyback capacity among the year's achievements, three pages of context away from the pay tables [12]. None of this required anyone to break a rule. That is the point: it is a legal, disclosed, self-reinforcing loop — and the workers whose raises, staffing, and safety margins compete with it for the same cash hold almost none of the shares it inflates.

To be equally clear about the limits: a high buyback ratio is not a prediction that a company's products will fail, and it is one weighted input among many — some retailers with substantial buyback programs still earn strong overall NOligarchy scores because their political-influence footprint is small. What a high ratio does tell you is what happens to your money after you spend it. At a company that routes a quarter — or half — of its revenue into its own shares, a slice of every purchase is converted into stock-market wealth, and the Federal Reserve's numbers say who collects it [10]. That is wealth extraction in the most literal sense — everyday spending, funneled upward into the concentration of wealth, power, and influence this site exists to make visible — and it is why buybacks live in the Wealth Extraction pillar. The score measures disclosed behavior, not corporate morality.

Boeing does not sell you groceries. But the capital-allocation pattern it exemplifies is everywhere in retail, and it is just as visible in retailers' own filings. From the most recent three fiscal years of SEC data in our pipeline:

eBay spent fifty cents of every revenue dollar on its own shares. Apple's quarter-trillion-dollar program is larger than the GDP of most countries. And — per the fairness note above — AutoZone and Lululemon carry some of the stronger overall scores in our index despite heavy repurchasing, because the score weighs political spending most. Every company's full breakdown, buybacks included, is on its NOligarchy score page, linked to the underlying filings.

A buyback is a company answering the question "what is the best thing we could do with this money?" with "make our share count smaller." Sometimes that answer is defensible. But when a company gives that answer year after year — at double its R&D budget — while its own engineers report pressure to cut corners, the buyback line on the cash flow statement stops being a financing detail. It becomes the most honest sentence the company publishes about what it values.

Boeing's sentence, 2013–2019, was $43.4 billion long. The disclosures are public. We think you should be able to read them — for every company you buy from.