Boeing’s very public series of embarrassing malfunctions have been analyzed and debated at length and explained quite comprehensively by individuals with far more expertise in the airplane business than me. But one need not know anything about aeronautics to understand that things are not going well for Boeing, and that the company’s approach is clearly broken. That much was made clear in a new Ars Technica piece from Eric Berger, walking readers through the race between Boeing and SpaceX to develop an astronaut capsule for space travel — a race that Boeing decisively lost. The story begins with the two companies competing for a NASA bid:
A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a “commercial crew” transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.
The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair.
With Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft finally due to take flight this week with astronauts on board, we know the extent of the loss, both in time and money. [The SpaceX model] Dragon first carried people to the space station nearly four years ago. In that span, the Crew Dragon vehicle has flown thirteen public and private missions to orbit. Because of this success, Dragon will end up flying 14 operational missions to the station for NASA, earning a tidy fee each time, compared to just six for [the Boeing model] Starliner. Through last year, Boeing has taken $1.5 billion in charges due to delays and overruns with its spacecraft development.
“[I]n the coming years,” Berger concludes, Boeing’s “space division is likely to be swallowed by younger companies that can bid less, deliver more, and act more expeditiously. The surprise is not that Boeing lost to a more nimble competitor in the commercial space race. The surprise is that this lumbering company made it at all.” (RELATED from Nate Hochman: A Step in the Right Direction for Elon Musk’s Free Speech Agenda)
In response to the story, Elon Musk — the founder and head of SpaceX — noted:
The distinction here is instructive for reasons that go far beyond the space race between SpaceX and Boeing. As the non-profit America 2100 wrote on X: “Elon is one of the last representatives of a distinctly American archetype: The eccentric maverick entrepreneur. So much of American business today is just bureaucracy—what James Burnham famously described as ‘managerialism.’ But [Elon Musk] built something radically new.”
As America 2100 explains, Burnham’s theory of a “managerial revolution,” outlined in his 1941 book of the same name, suggested that at the turn of the last century, developed nations had undergone a radical shift — a transition from entrepreneurial capitalism to a much more bureaucratized, technocratic system, coordinated and controlled by a new ruling class of “managerial elites” in both big business and big government. Describing these new elites, Burnham wrote:
Many different names are given them. We may often recognize them as “production managers,” operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government (for they are to be found in governmental enterprise just as in private enterprise) as administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on. I mean by managers, in short, those who already for the most part in contemporary society are actually managing, on its technical side, the actual process of production, no matter what the legal and financial form—individual, corporate, governmental—of the process.
The problem, of course, is that bureaucracy is by necessity opposed to dynamism, creativity, and entrepreneurialism — for those virtues, which were written into America’s frontier spirit, bring with them a newness and uncertainty that undermine the rules and regulations of the bureaucratic order. Thus, under managerialism, all that is new or different or revolutionary is quickly absorbed into the sprawling technocratic apparatus and converted into a predictable, manageable appendage of the system.
This is as true of Silicon Valley as it is of Boeing: What began as revolutionary garage or basement start-ups became, over the course of a few decades, “Big Tech.” What makes Musk unique is his radical independence — both in spirit and in material practice — from managerialism. In many ways, he is perhaps the last true inheritor of that old American character — the eccentric, irrepressible entrepreneur capitalist, in the mold of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or Sam Walton. It’s why the managers, both within and outside of Silicon Valley, hate him: He is unpredictable, contemptuous of rules and regulations, unwilling to defer to the authority of expertise and convention. In short, he can’t be managed. It’s difficult to think of anything more quintessentially American.
