Jack Welch, Legendary CEO Of General Electric, Dead At 84

Jack Welch, the larger-than-life chief executive who grew General Electric into an industrial powerhouse, has died. He was 84.

During his reign from 1981-2001, the company's market value skyrocketed to $410 billion from $12 billion. For his success in growing GE's value, Fortune magazine dubbed him "manager of the century" in 1999.

Welch aggressively bought and sold divisions, insisting GE rank near the top of any business in which it operated.

But his style of management has come under a lot of scrutiny and criticism since he left. Welch was known as "Neutron Jack" for cutting tens of thousands of jobs and critics say the seeds of GE's downfall were planted under his tenure.

"Today is a sad day for the entire GE family," company Chairman and CEO H. Lawrence Culp Jr. said in a statement Monday. "Jack was larger than life and the heart of GE for half a century. He reshaped the face of our company and the business world.

"When I last saw him, what I remember most vividly was when he asked me, 'So how exactly are you running the company?' Jack was still in it — committed to GE's success."

Welch's legacy has grown more complicated in the two decades since his retirement. GE has struggled, and its market value today is about a quarter of what its was at the peak.

GE was one of the 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average when it was created in 1896, but it was booted from the blue chip index in 2018.

NPR's Scott Horsley and Uri Berliner contributed to this report. [Copyright 2020 NPR]