In that same essay, Aboulafia noted that the incoming CEO, Muilenberg, was an aviation engineer, and though he had spent his career on the defense side of the company, there was hope that he could reverse some of McNerney's emphasis on the stock price. But it wasn't to be. Instead, he ratcheted up the company's stock buybacks, retiring 200 million shares — a quarter of the company's stock — at cost of $43 billion. How could Boeing afford to do that? As Jonathan Ford pointed out last August in the Financial Times, it was precisely because it was saving so much money on the 737 Max. Instead of starting from scratch and building a new plane, it simply "bolted new fuel-efficient engines onto a tweaked existing airframe." Ford concluded: "Boeing was able to redirect some of those 'savings' to repurchase stock instead." By the time Boeing decided to cobble together the 737 Max, its engineering culture was completely broken.