GE’s final split cleaves a fallen corporate empire

In 2021, General Electric announced it would split itself in three, ending one of the longest-running myths in corporate American history: that GE’s magic improved everything it touched. It spun off its healthcare arm last year, and the final split happened Tuesday morning, when its energy business started trading under its new name, Vernova — a very modern corporate portmanteau for a new age.

GE at its height was a titan that touched nearly every part of the economy. It produced refrigerators, X-ray machines, jet engines and wind turbines; it financed car loans and credit cards; and it influenced culture through its ownership of NBC and Universal studio. It has shed many of those businesses, along with jobs and back-breaking debt, under CEO Larry Culp, who was brought in after a string of disastrous deals and financial mismanagement washed out his two predecessors and reshaped the legacy of GE’s most famous CEO, Jack Welch.

Its remaining parts — healthcare, energy, and its legacy aerospace business, which still trades under the GE ticker — are worth about a third of Welch’s empire at its peak.

• NYT’s David Gelles on the legacy of “Neutron Jack,” the very model of a modern imperial executive.
• The beginning of the end for GE was its $10 billion purchase of French energy assets from Alstom, a dealmaking debacle that it hid from investors as long as it could.
• Jeff Immelt oversaw GE’s downfall. He wrote a book about.