In a recent article, Lazonick suggests that Boeing's emphasis on stock buybacks could have contributed to the two crashes of its new 737 MAX 8 airplane. As the next graph shows, between 2013 and 2019, Boeing was a very aggressive stock repurchaser, spending more than enough to consume its whole net income. Rather than spend the estimated $6 billion dollars to design a "clean-sheet" airplane from scratch, Boeing decided to add larger engines to an earlier design. This created a possible instability which Boeing attempted to prevent through a software fix. Indications are that the two crashes were caused by faulty sensor feeding false data to the software, causing the plane to plunge downward.