Buffett buys good companies with good management. Full stop. I’m the first one to say that may have been true of Boeing at one point, but it’s debatable today whether either of those two things applies.
In recent years they have opened a plant in the South, presumably to escape the long standing union in Everett, but they made such a hash of it that multiple countries and airlines have refused to accept aircraft produced in South Carolina.
They moved headquarters away from Washington State to … Chicago? Which put them at distance from both manufacturing facilities. This is a head scratcher, isn’t it? They increased the use of contractors and suppliers, allowing headcount reduction, but that only caused more problems because the FAA is kind of strict on who does what if it goes into commercial aircraft. So instead of fewer headaches they got more. Then came supply and distribution disruption. And Covid, which stomped the brakes on the business.
After decades of producing aircraft with multiple redundancies, they began producing them with single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities which grounded their newest model for years. Boeing has lost market share to Airbus over the past five years, predating the debacle with the 737Max crashes.
Aircraft manufacture is a highly cyclical, and often unpredictable market, the opposite of what Berkshire seems to value.
While I believe there is safety in being the only major manufacturer left in the US because the Pentagon (not to mention Congress) is unlikely to let them fail, that doesn’t seem a strong enough argument for Warren to take on a massively complex, capital intensive, bet-the-farm and sometimes unprofitable business that would dwarf so much of the rest of the corporation.
Oh, I forgot to mention that Airbus just picked off two more formerly exclusive Boeing clients, so…
(As for the former management, this is the best summary I have seen:
https://discussion.fool.com/boeing-could-have-turned-it-down-inc… )