>Maybe Apple, or Elon Musk, or some other person or company with a spare hundred billion could spin up a decent aircraft company?
SV has tried and failed time and again to realize the enormity of undertaking that is commercial aviation. There are less than 10 countries in the world capable of producing and marketing a competitive modern civil airliner. And of those, a vast majority are state nationalized conglomerates, or in the case of Airbus multi-country efforts. It takes almost the entirety of a country's aviation workforce and industrial capacity to maintain just one of these companies. Boeing cannot be replaced. It has to be fixed.
Probably not going to happen. If someone was interested, they could have had it easy if they bought up Bombardier's CSeries aviation unit before Airbus did.
Elon Musk doesn't have a spare hundred billion. Apple is one of the only entities that does, but it's not really their kind of market. Institutional customers that are going to expect gradual iteration and thorough specifications that allow independent third party repairs etc.
That's more like Microsoft's kind of market, but uh... don't give them any ideas.
