GE Aerospace (formerly General Electric)

General Electric was formed in 1892 through the merger of Edison General Electric — founded by Thomas Edison — and Thomson-Houston Electric Company, backed by J.P. Morgan. The merger was partly forced by financial necessity and partly by Morgan's recognition that Edison's DC electrical system was losing the "War of Currents" to Nikola Tesla's AC system, which Thomson-Houston had licensed. Edison was furious about the merger and never worked closely with GE afterward. The company that bore the Edison legacy had been built partly against his wishes.

Jack Welch became GE's CEO in 1981 at age 45 — the youngest CEO in GE's history. His management philosophy was radical: every GE business must be number one or number two in its market, or it would be fixed, sold, or closed. He eliminated 100,000 jobs in his first five years, earning the nickname "Neutron Jack" — like a neutron bomb, the buildings remained but the people were gone. Wall Street celebrated. GE's stock rose 4,000% during his twenty-year tenure. Fortune named him "Manager of the Century" in 1999.

General Electric briefly became the most valuable company in the world in 2000, with a market capitalisation exceeding $600 billion. Under Welch, GE had transformed from a manufacturing company into a financial services giant — GE Capital generated more than half of GE's profits, financing everything from aircraft leases to mortgages. The diversification was celebrated as visionary. It would later be recognised as the source of catastrophic fragility.

When the 2008 financial crisis erupted, GE Capital — which held hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed securities and commercial real estate loans — was suddenly exposed as dangerously leveraged. GE's stock fell 60%. The company required a $3 billion investment from Warren Buffett to restore confidence and was forced to cut its dividend for the first time since 1938. The financial engineering that had made Welch's GE appear invincible had hidden risks that his successor Jeff Immelt spent years unwinding.

GE announced in November 2021 that it would break itself into three separate publicly traded companies: GE Aerospace (jet engines), GE Vernova (energy), and GE HealthCare (medical devices). The breakup acknowledged that the conglomerate model Welch had built — combining unrelated businesses under a single management structure — had destroyed rather than created value. GE's market capitalisation at the announcement was approximately $120 billion — one-fifth of its 2000 peak. The most admired company in America had been dismantled by the logic of its own diversification.