American industrial conglomerate, once the world's most valuable firm (under Jack Welch, who ran it from 1981 to 2001). His successor, Jeffrey Immelt, oversaw a long decline; by 2021 GE had fallen out of the top 100. After selling assets for a decade, GE announced in 2021 that it would break into three separate companies: GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare and GE Vernova.
The dissolution proved remarkably successful. The three heirs are worth $600bn, five times GE's value before the split was announced. Their size-weighted price-to-earnings ratio is 45—double what it was in 2000.
GE Capital, the firm's financial arm, grew to supply nearly half of earnings by 2005, from 8% in 1981, and almost sank the whole enterprise in 2008. Its assets are now scattered throughout the financial system. AerCap, the owner of its enormous plane-leasing business, is thriving. Apollo has made the most effort to recreate GE Capital's operations, assembling a similarly eclectic range of asset-based lenders, including an aircraft-lending business previously owned by GE and a mid-market corporate-lending division staffed with former GE Capital employees.
Even long-shed divisions are prospering. Baker Hughes, an oil-services firm, is worth nearly three times what it was when GE sold its controlling share in 2019. GE's trainmaking business, shed the same year, has done even better. The division that made small, on-site generators was sold for $3bn in 2018 and is probably worth $15bn under private-equity ownership. GE's water-treatment unit was sold for $3bn to Suez; Veolia, which now owns Suez, bought out a minority investor in the division in 2025 at a valuation of $6bn.
Beginning in the 1940s GE used polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a kind of insulating fluid, in two factories along the Hudson River. The EPA banned PCB manufacture in 1977 and in 1984 declared a 200-mile stretch of the Hudson a Superfund site. Starting in 2009 GE dredged 2.75m cubic yards of contaminated sediment over six years at a cost of $1.7bn. By 2026 some fish in the Lower Hudson were safe to eat for the first time in 50 years.
Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.