General Electric was once the most valuable company in the world and a benchmark of American corporate excellence, but decades of financial engineering under CEO Jack Welch masked the true fragility of the conglomerate’s earnings. Under successor Jeff Immelt, GE’s financial arm GE Capital — a $500 billion shadow bank — became an existential liability, while the power division placed catastrophic bets on gas turbines in a market that was rapidly shifting to renewables. By 2018, GE was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 111 years of continuous membership, its stock having fallen over 75% as the empire that once defined corporate America quietly broke apart.
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