On July 18th, a federal judge in Texas scheduled what will likely be the final hearing in the case of United States v. The Boeing Company. The DOJ’s rationale for the change was that it expects companies to be “willing to learn from [their] mistakes.” This is not a skill that Boeing seems to possess. But Boeing does not seem to be able to learn from its mistakes. As I wrote in my book about the 737 MAX crashes, Boeing is so large and so firmly entrenched as one of the world’s two major commercial airplane makers that it is functionally immune from the market’s invisible hand. “Boeing became too big to fail,” former FTC chair Lina Khan said in a 2024 speech.