The death knell for corporate America’s greatest individual experiment in mergers and acquisitions sounded in November 2021 when General Electric announced its intention to split in three. A thousand deals were struck by Jack Welch, its notoriously gung-ho boss who ran the American industrial and financial giant between 1981 and 2001, a pace that did not slacken under his successor, Jeffrey Immelt. The result has been a monumental destruction of shareholder wealth. The firm’s market value peaked at $594bn in 2000. Today it is a relatively measly $83bn.
This lesson notwithstanding, bosses just cannot shake the need to shake hands. In 2021 dealmaking reached fever-pitch: a
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