Not a fun number to tally... In addition to scrutiny and lost trust, the safety issues that contributed to two downed planes full of passengers have cost Boeing a lot of money already:
- For customer reimbursements: The airlines that bought 737 Max planes were planning to fly them. Since they haven't since March, Boeing said last week it put aside $5.6B to reimburse them.
- For lost sales: Since March 13th, not a single 737 Max has been delivered. Instead of turning into $2.7B of revenue for Boeing, the planes are filling up company parking lots (literally).
- For the victims: The Ethiopian Airlines crash killed 157 people. The Lion Air crash killed 189 more. Boeing is paying their families through a $100M fund.
- Grand total: $8.4B
How does that giant number compare?... We took a stroll down the hall of corporate shame to find out.
- Volkswagen paid $30B for cheating regulators and customers about "clean" diesel cars.
- Facebook was just fined $5B for letting Cambridge Analytica manipulate 87M users' votes in the 2016 election.
- Wells Fargo was punished $575M for opening fake accounts for millions of unknowing customers.
- Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Citi (among other huge banks) paid $16.5B, $13B, and $7B for setting up the perfect kindling — subprime mortgage loans — for a 2008 financial system fiasco.