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I have to imagine that as a company, investing back into the company for the future will be a pretty easy lawsuit to win.

Especially when your stock price has returned back to where it was before a lot of divestment started.

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Investing back into yourself is generally true, but only under healthy economic conditions. Boeing exists in a really weird place of being "too big to fail" (ie a monopoly) where investing money into personnel and improved processes is actually wasteful towards the shareholders because it isn't necessary to maintain the core business.

Boeing is only too big to fail in the business of building passenger airliners. Maybe there is some strategic interest in keeping their defence arm afloat. But their space business is subject to market forces. There are plenty of players willing and able to replace Boeing in that specific industry.

Looks like that mentality is exactly what caused them to lose out to SpaceX. They thought they were the monopoly and now find themselves out of the picture.

Same mentality with their civil aviation business. Their failure to invest in the core of the company (making great planes) has led to spectacular - and deadly - failure.

The main reason they are still an important player in civil aviation is because Airbus can't make planes fast enough.

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