Welch’s legacy took a blow after he retired. The shares would lag behind the pre-Sept. 11 level for virtually all of Immelt’s 16 years as CEO. GE lost more than $200 billion in market value in a two-year stretch ending Dec. 31, 2018. The company’s latest CEO, Larry Culp, has overseen a partial comeback.

“Today is a sad day for the entire GE family,” Culp said in a statement. “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. Jack was a strong and constant influence throughout my career despite never having worked directly for him.”

Finance Revisited
Soon after Enron Corp. collapsed in late 2001, GE found itself facing accounting questions about whether Welch relied on moves such as one-time asset sales to produce consistently steady profit gains. GE Capital under Welch grew so vast that unit’s struggles in the 2008-2009 financial crisis would imperil all of GE. The company has since exited nearly all of the lending businesses.

“There’s been some revisiting of the robustness of the financial services model. GE Capital was providing cover for some other parts of the business,” Sonnenfeld said. There was a “backlash that did dog Jack Welch.”

John Francis Welch Jr. was born Nov. 19, 1935, in Peabody, Massachusetts. He was the only child of John Sr., a Boston & Maine Railroad conductor, and Grace Andrews Welch.

Growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, he was outspoken and athletic. He played golf, hockey and baseball at Salem High School, where he was voted “most talkative and noisiest” boy by classmates and wrote in the school literary magazine that he wanted to “make a million.”

‘You Punk!’
Welch’s mother infused him with self-confidence and helped him overcome a boyhood stutter -- “the most influential person in my life,” he wrote in his 2001 autobiography “Jack: Straight From the Gut.”

After a close hockey defeat as a youngster, Welch flung his stick across the ice, prompting his mother to march into the locker room, grab him by the jersey and shout: “You punk! If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win.”

In 1957, he graduated with honors from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Three years later, he received a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois and took a $10,500-a-year job with GE in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where the company developed new businesses in plastics.

Working his way through the ranks from vice president to vice chairman, Welch gained a reputation as a maverick, questioning whether GE was being run the right way. He saw GE’s future in plastics, medical equipment and financial services, not household appliances.