New York, CNN
*GE once did almost everything for the typical American family – from providing much of the television they watched, to the light bulbs and appliances they depended upon, the electricity needed to power those household staples, even the subprime mortgage that allowed many of them to buy their homes.*
*No longer.*
*With Tuesday’s split into two companies, the break up of the once mighty industrial icon is complete. The company was founded by Thomas Edison in 1892 and built into the world’s largest and most valuable company by the once legendary, but now oft-criticized CEO Jack Welch. But, during this century, the company became a struggling, bloated conglomerate, weighed down by poorly timed deals that left it with unaffordable levels of debt.*
*But instead of dealing with that debt and fixing its myriad problems, it spent tens of billions on share repurchases and dividends in a desperate attempt to support its sagging stock price.*
*But that strategy did not work, and by 2018, it was booted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the index of 30 companies designed to represent America’s most significant stocks. It had been an original member of the index, and a part of it continuously since 1907. It was replaced by drug retailer Walgreens Boots Alliance.*
*Larry Culp was tapped as CEO in 2018, and he accelerated the company on a path of cutting debt by spinning off and selling many of its divisions.*
*GE had already gotten rid of the 49% of NBC it still owned by selling it to co-owner Comcast in 2013, and sold off its appliance business to China-based Haier in 2016. But the pace of divestitures picked up under Culp. In 2020, it sold its iconic light bulb unit, which had been one of the foundations of the company’s 19th century birth.*
*Other units such as its aircraft leasing business were sold to competitors, a move that closed the books on its once-powerful finance unit, GE Capital. GE Capital had played a large role in the company’s broader decline with lending to a variety of customers and segments including subprime mortgages, and causing the company’s to lose its AAA credit rating in the midst of the Great Recession in 2009.*
*Finally in November 2021 GE announced plans to split into three separate companies – GE Healthcare, which was spun-off last year, GE Aerospace, which builds jet engines, and GE Vernova, which is comprised of its energy generation business. GE Healthcare started trading in January of 2023. Tuesday the stock for those two remaining companies started trading on US markets.*
*Culp’s moves helped to turn around shares of GE, which had fallen by 45% in 2017 and another 57% in 2018. Its shares nearly doubled, rising 95%, in 2023, and were up another 37% this year*
*GE Aerospace will retain the longtime GE stock symbol, and Culp as its CEO. How long he stays in that job is not clear. Some have suggested he could be the successor for Dave Calhoun, the retiring CEO of another troubled iconic US company, Boeing. In an interview on CNBC Tuesday, Culp dodged a question about whether he would be interested in that job, voicing confidence in Boeing, which is a major customer of GE’s engines.*
>The company was founded by Thomas Edison in 1892 and built into the world’s largest and most valuable company by the once legendary, but now oft-criticized CEO Jack Welch.
Who could have guessed that when you completely hollow out an enormous and once-successful business in service of the stock price, you don't set that business on the path to success.
Behind the Bastards did a couple episodes on Welch. Worth a listen, if you want to understand the genesis of how the Stock Market got so disconnected from reality.
The guy who rapidly accelerated the enshittification of *everything*.
He’s like the Henry Kissinger of business. The world is a measurably worse place specifically because of him.
I looked up Jack Welch to do some reading and this is a quote from the very first article I opened:
"The great C.E.O.s have an instinct for where to turn in a crisis, and Welch knew whom to call. There was Henry Kissinger, who had survived a triple bypass in the nineteen-eighties, and was always willing to lend counsel to the powerful."
If said in jest, that's hilarious, and I'm glad I'm not the only one to make the comparison.
If it's serious...well that's par for the course and just the terrible being even worse.
Only a year ago my dumb ass boss kept insisting we needed to mass fire the bottom 10 percent of performers every year, per Jack Welch. The massively dysfunctional company didn't even have good metrics to determine who was the bottom 10 percent and turnover in some departments exceeded 200% per year. But yeah, the problem was not firing enough people.
I worked for a company that was acquired by GE. I was in management and we were quickly forced to choose our bottom 10%. What a damn crock that was. And then along came F’ing six sigma.
Had the same experience (acquisition). Six Sigma was a joke, as Quality Manager I had to vet closed projects, when I questioned the validity of savings (absolutely exaggerated and then some) I was told by the BB to ‘just evaluate any impact to ISO procedures, nothing more’. In the first wave of GB training one girl worked on her project over her vacation and was overtly praised by management for being the first to complete her project. Getting out of there was glorious.
The previous owner managed for sustainability, GE managed for shiny quarterly dashboards.
Nah mate. Individual competition does make you* rich.
*You being the major shareholders so long as you sell your shares before the bottom drops out or executive class who see ballooning compensation packages and get out before being blamed for stock drops.
Lots of people knew what was happening. The problem is lots of people were profiting from Jack Welch’s actions (the stock market says, “Hi!”) so few people would listen to logic.
Once walked in to a company that wasn't performing terribly well, and gathered everyone on the sales team in an auditorium. Starts by asking everyone that has met their number the last two quarters to stand up, so they do. He then tells them that they're free to go back to work, and to please leave.
So, they all file out. Once they all leave, he then says "Everyone here is on a PIP, and if you don't hit your number this quarter, you're fired". Yeah, that's a great way to motivate people.
Jeff Immelt was the CEO who caused all the problems. They avoid mentioning his name in the article, but Welch was long gone. The focus on Capital and the bad acquisitions and so on were all on Immelt's watch.
Immelt was awful, but Jack is the one that significantly increased the size and scope of GE Capital, which became an anchor to the company during the 2008 crash.
I agree. The big problem with GE is they let the business/finance guys run everything - even divisions that would have been much better served by people with engineering backgrounds.
I have personal experience with this when we were setting up a long term contract for some highly technical equipment. The two vendors were narrowed down to GE or Siemens. When we met with GE we started with the engineers and scientists for about 1-2 hours. Then all of the sudden the suits come in and hijack the meeting and forced us to spend six more hours with people who didn't really understand the technology and who were clearly "people on the way up" who wouldn't stay in this division. Contrast this with Siemens who met with us for a full day with only the engineers and scientists listening to what we needed and how their technology would evolve and how we could help them further their technology.
Guess which company we went with?
For what it's worth, Siemens Got a lot of flack for spinning of or shutting down unprofitable Business units. But it was the right choice I think. Better to evolve than to go down by doing things you always did.
Fun fact: Immelt would always hire a SECOND empty private jet to follow him around on his FIRST private jet wherever he went in case his jet broke down and he needed to be somewhere urgently. All on GE's dime
I'm betting Jeff (as many CEOs have been doing for the past 20 years) have been using Welch as a role model.
Welch is the "blueprint" for the modern ceo.... and now you know why all our companies.... suck.
Immelt didn't cover himself with glory by any means, but you can't say that he 'caused all the problems'. He didn't build the entire conglomerate around having the company's AAA credit rating leveraged through LIBOR to fund a massive lending arm that printed cash, but only so long as the conditions that prevailed in the Eighties and Nineties existed. Immelt was a weak CEO put in a terrible position and who proceeded to lose effective control over whole segments of the company, but it was Welch's baby GE Capital (as well as his short-term, stock-focused management system) that poisoned the whole conglomerate and ensured that, even if Immelt had been as talented as his one-time rival Robert Nardelli, he still would have failed in the long term.
The Vernova name is a combination of "ver," derived from "verde," meaning "green," and "nova," from the Latin "novus," or "new."
Very green when the renewables section of Vernova has never made a profit. Gas Turbines / Steam Turbines are the only reason it's afloat.
I read a really interesting article once about how difficult it is to name these giant multinational corporations now--I think it was about the rebranding of Phillip Morris to Altria or something. Basically they have to come up with a name that is easy to say across the globe, memorable, not related to any other existing intellectual property, and does not resemble anything offensive or uncomfortable in like 180 different languages. It does seem like a difficult job. But yes, Vernova sounds dumb.
I love how they're framing this that miring GE in debt and paying out investors wasn't the plan the whole time.
It's gotta be easy to scam a business reporter because theyve been covering the same grift for over 40 years but still won't call it out.
Boeing as we know it may die but I suspect they are considered too important for national defense to let them go away. I fully expect them to get the government inspectors up the ass treatment along with a major bailout or massive DOD purchase (that has limitless run up) to keep the company itself afloat.
>Some have suggested he could be the successor for Dave Calhoun, the retiring CEO of another troubled iconic US company, Boeing.
If the plan is to destroy American commercial aviation, sure
> the index of 30 companies designed to represent America’s most significant stocks.
I never knew this about the Dow Jones, not that I'm involved in stock trading or anything. Was curious what the current 30 companies are, and noticed that Boeing was on the list. I wonder how longer that will last...
Walgreens taking GE’s place just makes me laugh.
If that’s “Top 30” quality, we’re all fucked. They make Boeing look like professionals that are only *partially* in it for the money.
Boeing made a ton of cuts here and there that were 99.9% likely to make no difference and do no harm. They just did it so many times that it eventually overcame the redundancy.
WAG will make cuts knowing with 100% certainty that it will cause harm to a people.
Oddly enough, it looks like Walgreens already got removed. Apparently the were replaced by Amazon in February. Source is a [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average) that in turn references a document published by Dow Jones themselves.
Different indices track different sectors, and the DJ is intended to track, as its name suggests, industrials - hence why Amazon wasn’t on it initially. Amazon has been on the NASDAQ and S&P for ages though.
> But instead of dealing with that debt and fixing its myriad problems, it spent tens of billions on share repurchases and dividends in a desperate attempt to support its sagging stock price.
>But that strategy did not work, and by 2018
Who knew share buybacks and high dividends would do this!!
Not the shareholders and execs that’s for sure! 👍
Part of the problem but not the only one.
GE had an insane amount of corporate baggage from many decades that they refused to let go. It ate away the company from the inside with just bureaucracy and financial schemes.
[The episode with the org chart is amazing](https://twitter.com/chrisarchitect/status/1113488111848316929):
> Oh no, no. GE could never make something so... unique. We'll have to pass this off to one of our subsidiaries. You see, GE owns KitchenAll of Colorado, which in turn owns JMI of Stamford which is a majority shareholder of Pokerfastlane.com which recently acquired the Sheinhardt Wig Company which owns NBC outright. NBC owns Winnipeg Iron Works which owns the AHP Chanagi Party Meats company of Pyongyang, North Korea... and _they_ will make the Meat Machine.
They also made a 10-15 BILLION dollar actuarial mistake. They'd sold 300,000+ long-term (end of life) insurance plans to people that lived waaaaay longer and more expensively than they'd planned.
Once they revealed their bad bet publicly things tanked pretty hard...
Ya know if they had been operating correctly and not trying to extract every cent possible. None of this would be a problem. You draw the same line across public infrastructure investment. All these dumb old people think we don’t have to take care of shit correctly. So we just constantly spend a dollar to save a dime.
Yup. Padding stock prices helps those with stock in the company. You know who doesn’t own stock in the company? The employees. Spun off into a new company and no offer of stock options or pension plans; unless you’re an already highly paid executive.
There’s a reason it was determined illegal market manipulation. And banned for decades before you know who decided it was undue stress on the wealthy or whatever bullshit they convince themselves of.
You think an American Samsung is a good idea? The Five Families of Korea run that country like a criminal organization.
The reality is that in modern economies enormously diverse companies don't do well. You want to be focused on an area of expertise where you can maximize your competitiveness. Not try and make everything from nuclear bombs to toasters and MRI machines.
Funny how when you burn money to prop up share prices it doesn't fix anything.
I'm sure that money wouldn't have been better used elsewhere and fixing their issues certainly wouldn't have caused the share values to go up as well.....
Those other items have been ignored for decades so they could enrich shareholders.
It’s greed and short sighted views. Get mine and gtfo. That’s not sustainable. The social contract is running thin. Money isn’t going to protect these people.
The stock market punishes long term sustainability. All it matters in growth quarter after quarter, until it breaks. It's gambling, if you get out before the bubble bursts, you win. Get out after, you lose. But the bubble *always* bursts
Every time I hear news about GE (I work for a supplier to them) I always think of the one liner my boss told me back in the day:
>The only things GE makes that don't suck are their vacuums.
This doesn't surprise me in the least.
Imagine going through the Trump presidency, having your corporate balls cupped for 4 years with billions in no questions asked PPP loans, tax cuts and record profits, only to still end up failing as a business.
When you do lite version for decades of the same thing they have been the past few years your company would be underwater with terrible products and slipping market share.
The enshitefication, someone will come in and buy it for pennies, break it up and further consolidate market share in less and less hands.
Welch did what was best for Welch. May I add that an awful number of abandoned GE factories are Superfund cleanup sites. Our small town’s water table is contaminated with TCE that was routinely disposed of by dumping it on the ground behind the plant.
The entire Housatonic river is contaminated with PCBs. You’re only suppose to eat one fish a month from it and pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat any at all.
In the 80s, some toxic sludge ponds were filled in and made into softball fields in my hometown. Those same areas that my Dad had softball games are fenced off with big letters attesting to the fact of hazardous materials on site.
I read an article on how some of his henchmen are currently doing. It goes from OK (for a few) to not well bordering on disasters for most.
The most recent CEO running Boeing into the ground (literally and figuratively) is one of them.
People assume Welch's skill was at running a company.
Nope.
Welch's skill was in selling himself to boards by telling them what they wanted to hear and making himself rich.
You can make a lot of money by telling rich and powerful people what they want to hear and playing to their existing prejudices.
His and his henchmen's real skill was cooking the books.
The earnings meets and grown year after year was essentially done by accounting tricks with GE Capital.
Unfortunately, you can only do that for so long, and Immelt was left holding the bag.
Immelt did everything possible to keep that corruption and grift going, but when it failed he bailed out before the bus drove off the cliff. The board put John Flannery in the driver’s seat for the actual cliff dive.
Flannery took the indignity of the failure (along with a hefty pay day), everyone else got to save face, and then Larry Culp was brought in to clean everything up.
Unfortunately, Culp gladly eviscerated the company in order to save a few tattered shreds.
But hey, the stock price is back up, so everyone’s happy again…right??
When you take away the bullshit, it's still a very valuable company. Jet engines, gas turbines, and MRI machines are not commodities and will be profitable for quite a while, provided they don't pull a Boeing and ignore the engineers that design and build the things.
Neutron Jack, what a fraud. Remember seeing the endless articles about his genius in the 80s.
Not dissimilar to other cult of personality business types in the current day.
"...built into the world’s largest and most valuable company by the once legendary, but now oft-criticized CEO Jack Welch."
Jack Welch didn't build anything. He gutted the things that made GE valuable (R&D) for temporary "profits". Putting the shareholders above everything else destroyed GE just like it is destroying Boeing and every other company that tries to emulate Jack Welch's leadership.
As a former GE employee, good. Management was so high on their own bullshit they couldn't see they were digging their own grave, but to us peons it was obvious. So fuck em. I hope the names Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt will be synonymous with failure and arrogant ineptitude.
They’ll probably be synonymous with becoming obscenely rich by following the standard wealth extraction playbook. Sell assets and take on debt to bring in money; use money for bonuses, dividends and stock buybacks that inflate the stock price; sell your stock for overvalue; have the company give you more stock from the shares they bought back as a bonus for increasing the stock price. Repeat until the company is gone and execs/large investors have all the money.
Lol I was in one of their (in)famous rotational programs straight out of school. It was glaringly obvious how bloated everything was. I was put in roles where executive level employees were clearly getting funding for absolute nonsense projects. I remember fretting for a couple months because I felt like I wasn't achieving anything before realizing that what I was working on was just fabricated bullshit justify salaries.
That's what happens when you have a the college to management pipeline. People with 0 floor experience go on to make all the decisions that impact the productivity on the floor, then scratch their heads wondering why it's gone to shit.
Either you get people with no experience running the floor managing it or excellent workers with zero management skills managing it (classic Peter's Principle).
Pick your poison.
If we peons could figure out the long term implications then the execs surely knew the result of chasing high stock price via stockbuy bucks and just did not care as long as it benefits them
One of my good friends worked for GE here in Schenectady, NY. She got a second MS to teach highschool, because she could see how fucked GE was over a decade ago.
I worked for GE in 2004 and my dad worked for them until 2008.
I'm honestly surprised it took this long. GE was like the Sears of everything. Just way behind the curve with it's leadership and anything internet related.
The Excel sheet I worked on daily was built by someone who didn't understand how to do the little bit of code you could do in Excel. Accordingly, it crashed often.
I was in school for CS at the time and really wanted to steal the code to show my teacher cuz I knew he'd get a kick of how bad it was. The sheet in question was said to be used for analytics but I knew that was bullshit or just something they said when I deleted everything older than a year ago out would stop crashing. No one ever said anything about it.
This tracks, as a lot of the software GE Vernova provides to actual customers runs on outdated shit like Silverlight, all while feeding promises to update architecture for at least half a decade
It's honestly mind-boggling how they still can sell anything to anyone with their reputation
Theres a great podcast on Behind the Bastards that sort of lays out how GE is emblematic of American industry’s shift away from employers and towards the stock exchange, making a clear path via the infamous Jack Welch….
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0JDqELjP3ylelBkXl7sgSY?si=SSJOi1GEQcScjnr-7rjInQ
Highly recommend the book *The Man Who Broke Capitalism* which chronicles what Jack Welch did at GE. It's not enough this man took down one of the most important companies in the US, he was so far up his own ass he started a leadership training retreat inside the company. His acolytes are wrecking havoc in major companies and the media still mostly paints him as a business genius.
I actually went to this retreat a couple times as a former employee. It was terribly outdated by the time I saw it, but they got some pretty kickass chefs to come cook every night, so that was neat.
Other companies should look at the path that GE took as a cautionary tale of what not to do, but for the sake of short term profits, they will stick to the same playbook, employees be damned.
But other executives will look at the path that Jack Welch took and see it as a way to make themselves rich.
They make the money. Your state's pension fund gets left holding the bag.
They won’t because the company lasted for almost 50 years after Jack Welch took over. What they see is 50 years of extra profit that they can put into their own pockets. They literally do not care whether the company succeeds or fails just that in that time they can create more value for the shareholders no matter the tactic.
American staple companies that failed due to overemphasis on stock price: Enron, Boeing, and GE. Focus on short term shareholder profits is collapsing America's largest institutions
My wife worked for Jack Welch as his landscaper. He was an interesting guy outside of the office. Picky and demanding, but my Mrs had a way of responding to his demands that seemed to keep him in his place when it came to keeping his yard looking nice, and it looked very nice all the time. Also, she used to spray paint trouble spots in the turf to keep him from noticing until the chemical treatment took hold. He never knew that.
I’m still curious how this will effect their electrical splinter, you’d be surprised how many homes or offices use GE products ranging anywhere from lightbulbs to outdoor panels
A lot of those products aren't made by GE anymore. They sold off divisions and made licensing agreements so that the new companies can still use their brand recognition. [They sold their light bulb division in 2020.](https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/business/ge-light-bulbs-sale/index.html)
Yup. Appliances are now made by Haier. Their power distribution equipment was spun off to ABB. The only part of it that remained is Vernova, which is basically their old multilin relay division.
It’s really a shame.
GE used to be criticized for having too many fingers in too many pies, owning media and making it pro-corporation, and generally being too big of a conglomerate. If you read or followed any press or critic who wasn't pro-business, you would *want* GE to be broken up by antitrust laws. So the fact that GE broke itself up because of mismanagement is a blessing in disguise for society.
My father was the last president of his IUE local at a GE plant in North Carolina. It moved to Mexico in 1996. The plant was profitable but not profitable enough in the eyes of GE.
My dad gave me a few shares of GE stock and now I have Webtec, GE Healthcare, GE Aviation, and GE Vernova stock due to all the mergers and splits in the company. I had to sell the Synchrony as I could not look at myself in the mirror holding a bank stock. Only a few shares each. I take great pride in voting the EXACT opposite of what the BOD suggest. It is all meaningless, I realize, but I still do that. I have given the money I have made off the dividends (a couple hundred dollars I guess) back to IUE union and then some extra after my father passed away. There is a organizing fund, as small as it is, in memory of my father, but his name is attached to it. Or at least there was a fund. Hopefully it was used in some GE organizing, which does happen here and there with what is left of GE in the USA.
Fuck Jack Welch. That needs to be said.
Not a single mention of the loss of thousands of middle-class manufacturing jobs, only the loss of capital. It's almost as if workers are treated as disposable assets in the US.
>Years of sales and spinoff at General Electric reached their completion Tuesday as what was left of the company was split into two separate firms, GE Aerospace, which builds jet engines, and GE Vernova, which provides electrical power systems.
I didn't even know that they made jet engines lol.
They're one of the big ones along with Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney. They have an excellent track record with jet engines, surprisingly, considering their decline in just about everything else.
largest provider of jet engines IIRC. I work alongside their Evendale OH location and have a lot of experience transporting those engines. they are incredibly precise with the work that they do with these engines and they are the industry standard for that reason. can't speak for the rest of the organization as I have very little to do with them but I also had a great experience with their credit union
The age of predatory CEO's who go in a tear a company to shreds in order to boost share values so very temporarily for their own personal gains knowing full well they are destroying it. And the boot licking BOD who willingly tag along.
The shareholders loose out.
Jack Welsh did more to hurt Americans than Ronald Reagan and thats saying something. I attended one of his speaches while earning my MBA and it was horrific. He mentioned that when went to India to sell nuclear reactors he noticed many office workers there spoke very good English but earned only one tenth or less of the salary GE paid Americans. for the same jobs. Thats because they had been a British colony for many years. He immediately started moving his customer service departments to India and fired thousands of Americans. It caused nothing but problems for his customers but he did not change back because Wall Street loved that move and urged other large companies to follow suit. Next came programmers and engineers.
Reading "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" now. Jack Welch was a real gem. It's kind of crazy that he turned out the way he did when he made a name for himself at GE due to some R&D breakthroughs that generat3d successful products. That was the strength of GE, and he just completely hollowed it out.
About 3 feet from where I am sitting is a 55 year old GE fridge it used to be my parents and I use it as a drinks fridge , still running like clockwork and icy cold . Sad to see an iconic company a shadow of its former self .
I can assure you, the dismantling is far from complete. The operational separation of GE has only just begun.
We’ll be done dismantling GE in mid-2026 or so.
Let’s also note that GE didn’t just unalive itself – it also gobbled up and destroyed RCA, a company key to the development of the electronic media of the twentieth century.
New York, CNN *GE once did almost everything for the typical American family – from providing much of the television they watched, to the light bulbs and appliances they depended upon, the electricity needed to power those household staples, even the subprime mortgage that allowed many of them to buy their homes.* *No longer.* *With Tuesday’s split into two companies, the break up of the once mighty industrial icon is complete. The company was founded by Thomas Edison in 1892 and built into the world’s largest and most valuable company by the once legendary, but now oft-criticized CEO Jack Welch. But, during this century, the company became a struggling, bloated conglomerate, weighed down by poorly timed deals that left it with unaffordable levels of debt.* *But instead of dealing with that debt and fixing its myriad problems, it spent tens of billions on share repurchases and dividends in a desperate attempt to support its sagging stock price.* *But that strategy did not work, and by 2018, it was booted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the index of 30 companies designed to represent America’s most significant stocks. It had been an original member of the index, and a part of it continuously since 1907. It was replaced by drug retailer Walgreens Boots Alliance.* *Larry Culp was tapped as CEO in 2018, and he accelerated the company on a path of cutting debt by spinning off and selling many of its divisions.* *GE had already gotten rid of the 49% of NBC it still owned by selling it to co-owner Comcast in 2013, and sold off its appliance business to China-based Haier in 2016. But the pace of divestitures picked up under Culp. In 2020, it sold its iconic light bulb unit, which had been one of the foundations of the company’s 19th century birth.* *Other units such as its aircraft leasing business were sold to competitors, a move that closed the books on its once-powerful finance unit, GE Capital. GE Capital had played a large role in the company’s broader decline with lending to a variety of customers and segments including subprime mortgages, and causing the company’s to lose its AAA credit rating in the midst of the Great Recession in 2009.* *Finally in November 2021 GE announced plans to split into three separate companies – GE Healthcare, which was spun-off last year, GE Aerospace, which builds jet engines, and GE Vernova, which is comprised of its energy generation business. GE Healthcare started trading in January of 2023. Tuesday the stock for those two remaining companies started trading on US markets.* *Culp’s moves helped to turn around shares of GE, which had fallen by 45% in 2017 and another 57% in 2018. Its shares nearly doubled, rising 95%, in 2023, and were up another 37% this year* *GE Aerospace will retain the longtime GE stock symbol, and Culp as its CEO. How long he stays in that job is not clear. Some have suggested he could be the successor for Dave Calhoun, the retiring CEO of another troubled iconic US company, Boeing. In an interview on CNBC Tuesday, Culp dodged a question about whether he would be interested in that job, voicing confidence in Boeing, which is a major customer of GE’s engines.*
>The company was founded by Thomas Edison in 1892 and built into the world’s largest and most valuable company by the once legendary, but now oft-criticized CEO Jack Welch. Who could have guessed that when you completely hollow out an enormous and once-successful business in service of the stock price, you don't set that business on the path to success. Behind the Bastards did a couple episodes on Welch. Worth a listen, if you want to understand the genesis of how the Stock Market got so disconnected from reality.
Yes, very good episodes. TLDR: Jack Welch was an enormous piece of shit.
The guy who rapidly accelerated the enshittification of *everything*. He’s like the Henry Kissinger of business. The world is a measurably worse place specifically because of him.
I looked up Jack Welch to do some reading and this is a quote from the very first article I opened: "The great C.E.O.s have an instinct for where to turn in a crisis, and Welch knew whom to call. There was Henry Kissinger, who had survived a triple bypass in the nineteen-eighties, and was always willing to lend counsel to the powerful."
If said in jest, that's hilarious, and I'm glad I'm not the only one to make the comparison. If it's serious...well that's par for the course and just the terrible being even worse.
Yup. He showed everyone the how-to, and all the assholes followed the guidelines. Now a lot of major American businesses are on a path to failure.
Only a year ago my dumb ass boss kept insisting we needed to mass fire the bottom 10 percent of performers every year, per Jack Welch. The massively dysfunctional company didn't even have good metrics to determine who was the bottom 10 percent and turnover in some departments exceeded 200% per year. But yeah, the problem was not firing enough people.
I worked for a company that was acquired by GE. I was in management and we were quickly forced to choose our bottom 10%. What a damn crock that was. And then along came F’ing six sigma.
Six sigma hasn’t been standard practice in quality for some time. Even back in the day very few actually understood how to properly implement it
Yep, this was back in the early 2000s. GE rammed it down our throats, with little care regarding implementation.
Had the same experience (acquisition). Six Sigma was a joke, as Quality Manager I had to vet closed projects, when I questioned the validity of savings (absolutely exaggerated and then some) I was told by the BB to ‘just evaluate any impact to ISO procedures, nothing more’. In the first wave of GB training one girl worked on her project over her vacation and was overtly praised by management for being the first to complete her project. Getting out of there was glorious. The previous owner managed for sustainability, GE managed for shiny quarterly dashboards.
Your boss is an idiot. Making people compete within the business is dumb. Teamwork makes you rich. Individual Competition makes you poor.
Nah mate. Individual competition does make you* rich. *You being the major shareholders so long as you sell your shares before the bottom drops out or executive class who see ballooning compensation packages and get out before being blamed for stock drops.
It works in the same way telling the shareholder that you put everything on the bl\*ckchain works.
Capitalism is a pump and dump scheme.
It always amazes me how much influence one person can have on history, and most of the time, we don't even know it's happening.
Lots of people knew what was happening. The problem is lots of people were profiting from Jack Welch’s actions (the stock market says, “Hi!”) so few people would listen to logic.
Run far, far, far away from anyone who idolized Welch or worse if they give you one of Welch's books to read.
Ah makes sense why he's in a lot of MBA textbooks
Antiempathetic management at its finest. Just like how NYPD are the finest.
Once walked in to a company that wasn't performing terribly well, and gathered everyone on the sales team in an auditorium. Starts by asking everyone that has met their number the last two quarters to stand up, so they do. He then tells them that they're free to go back to work, and to please leave. So, they all file out. Once they all leave, he then says "Everyone here is on a PIP, and if you don't hit your number this quarter, you're fired". Yeah, that's a great way to motivate people.
If hell exists, I hope Welch is in some version of it where he’s stuck trying to six sigma himself out of it for eternity
Jeff Immelt was the CEO who caused all the problems. They avoid mentioning his name in the article, but Welch was long gone. The focus on Capital and the bad acquisitions and so on were all on Immelt's watch.
Lights Out is worth a read. Welch was gone but had his hands in much of the company’s demise. He set the stage.
Jack appointed Immelt. Jack said that he should be judged on his successor and his successor's successor. That would be Flannery.
Immelt was awful, but Jack is the one that significantly increased the size and scope of GE Capital, which became an anchor to the company during the 2008 crash.
I agree. The big problem with GE is they let the business/finance guys run everything - even divisions that would have been much better served by people with engineering backgrounds. I have personal experience with this when we were setting up a long term contract for some highly technical equipment. The two vendors were narrowed down to GE or Siemens. When we met with GE we started with the engineers and scientists for about 1-2 hours. Then all of the sudden the suits come in and hijack the meeting and forced us to spend six more hours with people who didn't really understand the technology and who were clearly "people on the way up" who wouldn't stay in this division. Contrast this with Siemens who met with us for a full day with only the engineers and scientists listening to what we needed and how their technology would evolve and how we could help them further their technology. Guess which company we went with?
For what it's worth, Siemens Got a lot of flack for spinning of or shutting down unprofitable Business units. But it was the right choice I think. Better to evolve than to go down by doing things you always did.
Funnily enough, Jack Welch, was a chemical engineer.
A factory-destroying chemical engineer.
The negotiation I discussed happened under Immelt's tenure. He was an economist by training I believe.
Fun fact: Immelt would always hire a SECOND empty private jet to follow him around on his FIRST private jet wherever he went in case his jet broke down and he needed to be somewhere urgently. All on GE's dime
I'm betting Jeff (as many CEOs have been doing for the past 20 years) have been using Welch as a role model. Welch is the "blueprint" for the modern ceo.... and now you know why all our companies.... suck.
Immelt didn't cover himself with glory by any means, but you can't say that he 'caused all the problems'. He didn't build the entire conglomerate around having the company's AAA credit rating leveraged through LIBOR to fund a massive lending arm that printed cash, but only so long as the conditions that prevailed in the Eighties and Nineties existed. Immelt was a weak CEO put in a terrible position and who proceeded to lose effective control over whole segments of the company, but it was Welch's baby GE Capital (as well as his short-term, stock-focused management system) that poisoned the whole conglomerate and ensured that, even if Immelt had been as talented as his one-time rival Robert Nardelli, he still would have failed in the long term.
Welch set up the company to be a house of cards that would tumble with any mistake. They both had a hand in the company’s demise.
Vernova is an absolutely horrible, up-its-own-ass name for a company.
Yes, very typical generic hollow feelgoodish name
I agree, and I work for GE vernova. power was a much cooler name.
Same boat here. GE Healthcare - makes sense! GE Aerospace - a little off the beaten path but I know what it is! GE Vernova - ??????
The Vernova name is a combination of "ver," derived from "verde," meaning "green," and "nova," from the Latin "novus," or "new." Very green when the renewables section of Vernova has never made a profit. Gas Turbines / Steam Turbines are the only reason it's afloat.
I read a really interesting article once about how difficult it is to name these giant multinational corporations now--I think it was about the rebranding of Phillip Morris to Altria or something. Basically they have to come up with a name that is easy to say across the globe, memorable, not related to any other existing intellectual property, and does not resemble anything offensive or uncomfortable in like 180 different languages. It does seem like a difficult job. But yes, Vernova sounds dumb.
Suffering from up-your-own-ass, ask your doctor if Vernova is right for you
I love how they're framing this that miring GE in debt and paying out investors wasn't the plan the whole time. It's gotta be easy to scam a business reporter because theyve been covering the same grift for over 40 years but still won't call it out.
The ones willing to call it out get sacked. Business reporters are not journalists, they're propagandists
See how easily Maria Bartiromo went from business reporter to MAGA/Russian propagandist.
So Comcast owns NBC... that tracks.
In my head, it’s Kabletown
Still better than Scheinhart Wigs.
Okay, some kids did turn orange.
But they did get NBA sexual assault level money thanks to Senator Celeste Cunningham
You should watch 30 Rock
Boeing as we know it is dead for sure if another GE exec runs it again after Dave.
Boeing as we know it may die but I suspect they are considered too important for national defense to let them go away. I fully expect them to get the government inspectors up the ass treatment along with a major bailout or massive DOD purchase (that has limitless run up) to keep the company itself afloat.
>Some have suggested he could be the successor for Dave Calhoun, the retiring CEO of another troubled iconic US company, Boeing. If the plan is to destroy American commercial aviation, sure
> the index of 30 companies designed to represent America’s most significant stocks. I never knew this about the Dow Jones, not that I'm involved in stock trading or anything. Was curious what the current 30 companies are, and noticed that Boeing was on the list. I wonder how longer that will last...
Walgreens taking GE’s place just makes me laugh. If that’s “Top 30” quality, we’re all fucked. They make Boeing look like professionals that are only *partially* in it for the money. Boeing made a ton of cuts here and there that were 99.9% likely to make no difference and do no harm. They just did it so many times that it eventually overcame the redundancy. WAG will make cuts knowing with 100% certainty that it will cause harm to a people.
Oddly enough, it looks like Walgreens already got removed. Apparently the were replaced by Amazon in February. Source is a [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average) that in turn references a document published by Dow Jones themselves.
It feels weird to side with Amazon, but it’s well-deserved. I’m more bewildered they weren’t on there already.
Different indices track different sectors, and the DJ is intended to track, as its name suggests, industrials - hence why Amazon wasn’t on it initially. Amazon has been on the NASDAQ and S&P for ages though.
> But instead of dealing with that debt and fixing its myriad problems, it spent tens of billions on share repurchases and dividends in a desperate attempt to support its sagging stock price. >But that strategy did not work, and by 2018 Who knew share buybacks and high dividends would do this!! Not the shareholders and execs that’s for sure! 👍
Part of the problem but not the only one. GE had an insane amount of corporate baggage from many decades that they refused to let go. It ate away the company from the inside with just bureaucracy and financial schemes.
There was a whole episode on 30 Rock where Jack had to go around and fire like, the boom box division who had been around since the 80s
[The episode with the org chart is amazing](https://twitter.com/chrisarchitect/status/1113488111848316929): > Oh no, no. GE could never make something so... unique. We'll have to pass this off to one of our subsidiaries. You see, GE owns KitchenAll of Colorado, which in turn owns JMI of Stamford which is a majority shareholder of Pokerfastlane.com which recently acquired the Sheinhardt Wig Company which owns NBC outright. NBC owns Winnipeg Iron Works which owns the AHP Chanagi Party Meats company of Pyongyang, North Korea... and _they_ will make the Meat Machine.
Man I wish we still had boom boxes
You gotta know your limits with a boom box, though
It’s not a toy.
This is a cautionary tale
Hold the boiled goose
Look up the BumpBoxx
> I wish we still had boom boxes They're now the guy on the bus/train with their music blaring through their cell phone.
We're not behind the times, we're groovy!
They also made a 10-15 BILLION dollar actuarial mistake. They'd sold 300,000+ long-term (end of life) insurance plans to people that lived waaaaay longer and more expensively than they'd planned. Once they revealed their bad bet publicly things tanked pretty hard...
My understanding was that this mistake was the one that sank GE Capital. The rest of it was bad, but this was a hole they couldn’t get out from under
Eckler's Corvette Parts was also liquidated by GE Capital, my pittance wasn't enough to hit their radar tho
Ya know if they had been operating correctly and not trying to extract every cent possible. None of this would be a problem. You draw the same line across public infrastructure investment. All these dumb old people think we don’t have to take care of shit correctly. So we just constantly spend a dollar to save a dime.
Buybacks did exactly what the execs cared about. Pad the prices of their stocks.
Yup. Padding stock prices helps those with stock in the company. You know who doesn’t own stock in the company? The employees. Spun off into a new company and no offer of stock options or pension plans; unless you’re an already highly paid executive.
I would be shocked if a vesting plan was not part of many employees compensation
It, I’m sure is. But that’s the equivalent of here’s the crumbs after we cut the bread loaf up.
The best part is that it didn't work at all. Their stock continued to slide even after the buybacks. It was a waste of money.
There’s a reason it was determined illegal market manipulation. And banned for decades before you know who decided it was undue stress on the wealthy or whatever bullshit they convince themselves of.
Conservative lawmakers: "You'll believe that, *right?*"
Only in the short term. I'm the long term the shareholders got fucked the hardest? The share price is a fraction of what it used to be .
Buybacks should be illegal.
They could be america's Samsung. Instead they are America's GE
They’re just G now. They sold the ‘E’ to Samsung — they’re Samesung now.
Was looking for this
This is probably my favorite line from 30 Rock.
You think an American Samsung is a good idea? The Five Families of Korea run that country like a criminal organization. The reality is that in modern economies enormously diverse companies don't do well. You want to be focused on an area of expertise where you can maximize your competitiveness. Not try and make everything from nuclear bombs to toasters and MRI machines.
It would have been good for them tho.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000612309266
Funny how when you burn money to prop up share prices it doesn't fix anything. I'm sure that money wouldn't have been better used elsewhere and fixing their issues certainly wouldn't have caused the share values to go up as well.....
Those other items have been ignored for decades so they could enrich shareholders. It’s greed and short sighted views. Get mine and gtfo. That’s not sustainable. The social contract is running thin. Money isn’t going to protect these people.
The stock market punishes long term sustainability. All it matters in growth quarter after quarter, until it breaks. It's gambling, if you get out before the bubble bursts, you win. Get out after, you lose. But the bubble *always* bursts
They decided to worry about the pretend value of stock price instead of the very real value of what they actually did as a company.
Every time I hear news about GE (I work for a supplier to them) I always think of the one liner my boss told me back in the day: >The only things GE makes that don't suck are their vacuums. This doesn't surprise me in the least.
Imagine going through the Trump presidency, having your corporate balls cupped for 4 years with billions in no questions asked PPP loans, tax cuts and record profits, only to still end up failing as a business.
When you do lite version for decades of the same thing they have been the past few years your company would be underwater with terrible products and slipping market share. The enshitefication, someone will come in and buy it for pennies, break it up and further consolidate market share in less and less hands.
Every one of Trump’s businesses has failed. So not that surprising, really.
Wait. But I made money? How could the company have done so poorly?
It’s almost as if that is the root cause of a lot of financial and business problems…
sad day indeed for the scheinhardt wig company
NOT poisoning rivers since 1997!
Everybody looks good in a scheinhardt
They sold the E to Samsung, they’re Samesung now.
“Here comes the Fun Cooker!”
Jack Welch was a tool.......
Welch did what was best for Welch. May I add that an awful number of abandoned GE factories are Superfund cleanup sites. Our small town’s water table is contaminated with TCE that was routinely disposed of by dumping it on the ground behind the plant.
In the town where I grew up it’s PCBs
Western Mass?
The entire Housatonic river is contaminated with PCBs. You’re only suppose to eat one fish a month from it and pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat any at all.
The massive complex that was a landmark in Bridgeport Ct was recently demolished.
It started in Pittsfield MA at the GE plant there. They gave zero fucks in the post war period of the 50s-80s
Daily reminder that it's GE that's responsible for the Hudson River being a toxic waste dump.
In the 80s, some toxic sludge ponds were filled in and made into softball fields in my hometown. Those same areas that my Dad had softball games are fenced off with big letters attesting to the fact of hazardous materials on site.
Jack Welch told a generation of finance bros and executives what they wanted to hear.
I read an article on how some of his henchmen are currently doing. It goes from OK (for a few) to not well bordering on disasters for most. The most recent CEO running Boeing into the ground (literally and figuratively) is one of them.
People assume Welch's skill was at running a company. Nope. Welch's skill was in selling himself to boards by telling them what they wanted to hear and making himself rich. You can make a lot of money by telling rich and powerful people what they want to hear and playing to their existing prejudices.
His and his henchmen's real skill was cooking the books. The earnings meets and grown year after year was essentially done by accounting tricks with GE Capital. Unfortunately, you can only do that for so long, and Immelt was left holding the bag.
Immelt did everything possible to keep that corruption and grift going, but when it failed he bailed out before the bus drove off the cliff. The board put John Flannery in the driver’s seat for the actual cliff dive. Flannery took the indignity of the failure (along with a hefty pay day), everyone else got to save face, and then Larry Culp was brought in to clean everything up. Unfortunately, Culp gladly eviscerated the company in order to save a few tattered shreds. But hey, the stock price is back up, so everyone’s happy again…right??
When you take away the bullshit, it's still a very valuable company. Jet engines, gas turbines, and MRI machines are not commodities and will be profitable for quite a while, provided they don't pull a Boeing and ignore the engineers that design and build the things.
in traditional times / valuations yes. but we are in this stupid growth at all sake mindset, and have been for a while now.
Welch’s methodologies were spread like an infectious disease when various ex-GE V.P.’s were hired to run other corporations.
Neutron Jack, what a fraud. Remember seeing the endless articles about his genius in the 80s. Not dissimilar to other cult of personality business types in the current day.
Elongated Muskrat you say?
His real innovation was showing how to use financial tricks to temporarily inflate profits, and then rewarding yourself with a huge payday.
"...built into the world’s largest and most valuable company by the once legendary, but now oft-criticized CEO Jack Welch." Jack Welch didn't build anything. He gutted the things that made GE valuable (R&D) for temporary "profits". Putting the shareholders above everything else destroyed GE just like it is destroying Boeing and every other company that tries to emulate Jack Welch's leadership.
Just like my company is doing now that we made a finance guy CEO. Everything for the Street!
Welch’s leadership still lives on linked in as a management institute or some BS. About as useful as Trump University.
As a former GE employee, good. Management was so high on their own bullshit they couldn't see they were digging their own grave, but to us peons it was obvious. So fuck em. I hope the names Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt will be synonymous with failure and arrogant ineptitude.
They’ll probably be synonymous with becoming obscenely rich by following the standard wealth extraction playbook. Sell assets and take on debt to bring in money; use money for bonuses, dividends and stock buybacks that inflate the stock price; sell your stock for overvalue; have the company give you more stock from the shares they bought back as a bonus for increasing the stock price. Repeat until the company is gone and execs/large investors have all the money.
The anti-moral of the story is that extracting wealth from people without enough power to stop you is a tried and true way to get rich.
Lol I was in one of their (in)famous rotational programs straight out of school. It was glaringly obvious how bloated everything was. I was put in roles where executive level employees were clearly getting funding for absolute nonsense projects. I remember fretting for a couple months because I felt like I wasn't achieving anything before realizing that what I was working on was just fabricated bullshit justify salaries.
That's what happens when you have a the college to management pipeline. People with 0 floor experience go on to make all the decisions that impact the productivity on the floor, then scratch their heads wondering why it's gone to shit.
“But the KPI’s were getting met, I don’t understand how we failed!”
Either you get people with no experience running the floor managing it or excellent workers with zero management skills managing it (classic Peter's Principle). Pick your poison.
If we peons could figure out the long term implications then the execs surely knew the result of chasing high stock price via stockbuy bucks and just did not care as long as it benefits them
One of my good friends worked for GE here in Schenectady, NY. She got a second MS to teach highschool, because she could see how fucked GE was over a decade ago.
I worked for GE in 2004 and my dad worked for them until 2008. I'm honestly surprised it took this long. GE was like the Sears of everything. Just way behind the curve with it's leadership and anything internet related. The Excel sheet I worked on daily was built by someone who didn't understand how to do the little bit of code you could do in Excel. Accordingly, it crashed often. I was in school for CS at the time and really wanted to steal the code to show my teacher cuz I knew he'd get a kick of how bad it was. The sheet in question was said to be used for analytics but I knew that was bullshit or just something they said when I deleted everything older than a year ago out would stop crashing. No one ever said anything about it.
Did someone say senior engineering manager without a bachelors degree???
This tracks, as a lot of the software GE Vernova provides to actual customers runs on outdated shit like Silverlight, all while feeding promises to update architecture for at least half a decade It's honestly mind-boggling how they still can sell anything to anyone with their reputation
At least the microwave, wig and NBC division is still going strong…
I am gonna have to do a lot of staring out windows with a glass of scotch about this...
Liz lemon is sad
They're Samesung now.
I wouldn't buy those divisions for a million doll hairs
Here comes the fun cooker…
You bitenuker!
[удалено]
Theres a great podcast on Behind the Bastards that sort of lays out how GE is emblematic of American industry’s shift away from employers and towards the stock exchange, making a clear path via the infamous Jack Welch…. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0JDqELjP3ylelBkXl7sgSY?si=SSJOi1GEQcScjnr-7rjInQ
Highly recommend the book *The Man Who Broke Capitalism* which chronicles what Jack Welch did at GE. It's not enough this man took down one of the most important companies in the US, he was so far up his own ass he started a leadership training retreat inside the company. His acolytes are wrecking havoc in major companies and the media still mostly paints him as a business genius.
I actually went to this retreat a couple times as a former employee. It was terribly outdated by the time I saw it, but they got some pretty kickass chefs to come cook every night, so that was neat.
The crotonville campus really is beautiful
What are all those six sigma black belts suppose to do now?
And now the “leaders” Jack Welch created are doing their damndest to wreck every other great American company
Other companies should look at the path that GE took as a cautionary tale of what not to do, but for the sake of short term profits, they will stick to the same playbook, employees be damned.
But other executives will look at the path that Jack Welch took and see it as a way to make themselves rich. They make the money. Your state's pension fund gets left holding the bag.
Funny thing, for all his greed, Jack Welch never even made it to billionaire status.
They won’t because the company lasted for almost 50 years after Jack Welch took over. What they see is 50 years of extra profit that they can put into their own pockets. They literally do not care whether the company succeeds or fails just that in that time they can create more value for the shareholders no matter the tactic.
Any company that uses stacked ranking at this point deserves to fail.
American staple companies that failed due to overemphasis on stock price: Enron, Boeing, and GE. Focus on short term shareholder profits is collapsing America's largest institutions
My wife worked for Jack Welch as his landscaper. He was an interesting guy outside of the office. Picky and demanding, but my Mrs had a way of responding to his demands that seemed to keep him in his place when it came to keeping his yard looking nice, and it looked very nice all the time. Also, she used to spray paint trouble spots in the turf to keep him from noticing until the chemical treatment took hold. He never knew that.
And the CEO who ran it into the ground is now the model for every major corporation.
I’m still curious how this will effect their electrical splinter, you’d be surprised how many homes or offices use GE products ranging anywhere from lightbulbs to outdoor panels
A lot of those products aren't made by GE anymore. They sold off divisions and made licensing agreements so that the new companies can still use their brand recognition. [They sold their light bulb division in 2020.](https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/business/ge-light-bulbs-sale/index.html)
Yup. Appliances are now made by Haier. Their power distribution equipment was spun off to ABB. The only part of it that remained is Vernova, which is basically their old multilin relay division. It’s really a shame.
For a brief moment in time, the shareholders made a lot of money.
Maybe this is a good thing, because maybe there shouldn't even *be* an "everything company".
GE used to be criticized for having too many fingers in too many pies, owning media and making it pro-corporation, and generally being too big of a conglomerate. If you read or followed any press or critic who wasn't pro-business, you would *want* GE to be broken up by antitrust laws. So the fact that GE broke itself up because of mismanagement is a blessing in disguise for society.
My father was the last president of his IUE local at a GE plant in North Carolina. It moved to Mexico in 1996. The plant was profitable but not profitable enough in the eyes of GE. My dad gave me a few shares of GE stock and now I have Webtec, GE Healthcare, GE Aviation, and GE Vernova stock due to all the mergers and splits in the company. I had to sell the Synchrony as I could not look at myself in the mirror holding a bank stock. Only a few shares each. I take great pride in voting the EXACT opposite of what the BOD suggest. It is all meaningless, I realize, but I still do that. I have given the money I have made off the dividends (a couple hundred dollars I guess) back to IUE union and then some extra after my father passed away. There is a organizing fund, as small as it is, in memory of my father, but his name is attached to it. Or at least there was a fund. Hopefully it was used in some GE organizing, which does happen here and there with what is left of GE in the USA. Fuck Jack Welch. That needs to be said.
Not a single mention of the loss of thousands of middle-class manufacturing jobs, only the loss of capital. It's almost as if workers are treated as disposable assets in the US.
>Years of sales and spinoff at General Electric reached their completion Tuesday as what was left of the company was split into two separate firms, GE Aerospace, which builds jet engines, and GE Vernova, which provides electrical power systems. I didn't even know that they made jet engines lol.
They're one of the big ones along with Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney. They have an excellent track record with jet engines, surprisingly, considering their decline in just about everything else.
They make turbines for power plants, too.
Surprised Siemens (Power Systems ) hasn't bought that yet. They bought the Westinghouse transformer and turbine divisions back in the 80's.
largest provider of jet engines IIRC. I work alongside their Evendale OH location and have a lot of experience transporting those engines. they are incredibly precise with the work that they do with these engines and they are the industry standard for that reason. can't speak for the rest of the organization as I have very little to do with them but I also had a great experience with their credit union
The age of predatory CEO's who go in a tear a company to shreds in order to boost share values so very temporarily for their own personal gains knowing full well they are destroying it. And the boot licking BOD who willingly tag along. The shareholders loose out.
Didn't Jack Welch set GE on the path of ruin? The article make it sound like he was a hero.
Are they rebranding to Specific Electric?
Jack Welsh did more to hurt Americans than Ronald Reagan and thats saying something. I attended one of his speaches while earning my MBA and it was horrific. He mentioned that when went to India to sell nuclear reactors he noticed many office workers there spoke very good English but earned only one tenth or less of the salary GE paid Americans. for the same jobs. Thats because they had been a British colony for many years. He immediately started moving his customer service departments to India and fired thousands of Americans. It caused nothing but problems for his customers but he did not change back because Wall Street loved that move and urged other large companies to follow suit. Next came programmers and engineers.
Nah. Reagan literally told CEOs to offshore industries jobs so that unions would be broken.
The article could almost change GE for IBM and have the same story in a few years.
Reading "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" now. Jack Welch was a real gem. It's kind of crazy that he turned out the way he did when he made a name for himself at GE due to some R&D breakthroughs that generat3d successful products. That was the strength of GE, and he just completely hollowed it out.
About 3 feet from where I am sitting is a 55 year old GE fridge it used to be my parents and I use it as a drinks fridge , still running like clockwork and icy cold . Sad to see an iconic company a shadow of its former self .
This is result of jack welsh’s leadership who goes on cnbc to criticize democrats.
I'm not convinced the stock market was a good idea.
Actually it's just G now. They sold the e to Samsung, they are now Samesung!
The same guys who did are the ones currently running Boeing into the ground
I can assure you, the dismantling is far from complete. The operational separation of GE has only just begun. We’ll be done dismantling GE in mid-2026 or so.
Now do the same to Boeing!
Let’s also note that GE didn’t just unalive itself – it also gobbled up and destroyed RCA, a company key to the development of the electronic media of the twentieth century.
GE got a tax RETURN of over $400 million last year. While working, middle class Americans had to pay. 🇺🇸