Before G.E.’s status began to wane, it was the blue chip of blue chips.

The Power and the Glory

In 1985, G.E. purchased RCA for $6.3 billion in cash, then the largest M&A deal of all time. That G.E. was actually buying back a business it had started 65 years earlier was largely forgotten

By William D. Cohan

There were so many surprising things I learned about the General Electric company while researching my new book, Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon, that it’s not so easy to focus on just one.

For instance, I had no idea that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Jeff Immelt, the C.E.O. of G.E. at that time, seriously considered having G.E. Capital, the company’s massive non-bank bank—a largely unregulated financial institution—file for bankruptcy protection not once but twice. Nor did I know that a century ago, G.E. was one of the first companies to try to develop an electric car, though it ended up being a flop. I also didn’t know that in 2018, the current C.E.O., Larry Culp, worked with Trian Partners, the hedge fund that still owns a big stake in G.E., to engineer a coup d’état that would install Culp and get rid of John Flannery, who had been C.E.O. for a little more than a year.