After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 despite other jurisdictions grounding the aircraft.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.

There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

What amazes me is that the first crash is arguably "pilot error compounded by MCAS" but they didn't just immediately pay the tens of millions it would have cost to retrofit all existing planes with the double-sensors that were an option but not required.

Ah I see - makes sense then, if that is all accurate. It would be good to know how coordinated this was internally. If the malicious behaviour genuinely went all the way to the top, then probably those people all deserve criminal sentencing, for sure.

For me the real kicker was that Boeing convinced the FAA that the aircraft did not need redundant Angle of Attack sensors, even though they knew that this meant that there was a single point of failure in a system which had control authority (ie, MCAS).

Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.

IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.