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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The US’s defence and aerospace industries seem to be having an extremely Normal Week.
First a whistleblower who had raised concerns about Boeing’s safety practices was found dead Saturday, according to multiple news outlets. The Charleston County Coroner’s office said his death is from “what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound”, according to the reports. His lawyers told NPR he was giving testimony in a deposition that hadn’t yet finished.
And today, the National Transportation Safety Board chair wrote a letter to two senators about investigators’ challenges determining what exactly happened when Boeing worked on the “door plug” that blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight:
To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft. Boeing has informed us that they are unable to find the records documenting this work. A verbal request was made by our investigators for security camera footage to help obtain this information; however, they were informed the footage was overwritten. The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB’s investigation moving forward.
Reuters reported last week that Boeing told senators it believes “the documents required by our processes were not created when the door plug was opened.” A Boeing company official told Reuters that the security camera footage gets “overwritten” every 30 days.
Moving on! SXSW, the Austin-based festival/occasional tech conflagration, is struggling with blowback because of the US Army’s “super sponsorship” of the event:
Also presumably because SXSW takes place in Texas:
And now this CNBC interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp has been making the rounds. While most of the interview is pretty standard, Karp closed it out with some, uh, interesting comments about short sellers:
I love burning the short sellers. Almost nothing makes a human happier than taking the lines of cocaine away from these short sellers, who are going short on a truly great American company — not just ours — they just love pulling down great American companies so that they can pay for their coke.
And the best thing that can happen to them is, we will provide — we will lead their coke dealers — to their homes, after they can’t pay their bills… Go ahead, do your thing, we’ll do our thing.
Now, there are some easy crank-sounding jokes to be made about that quote and Palantir’s business selling software to intelligence agencies.
But in light of a recent (and very good!) documentary series about the dangers of getting too conspiratorially minded about law-enforcement-related software, it’s probably best to leave it there.
Palantir hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment, but we’ll update if or when they do.
Read the full article here