I'm Felix Salmon and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Tuesday, November the night, and we're focused on the end of General Electric.

Back in 2000, it was the most valuable company in the world.

It was named the world's most respected company by the Financial Times.

Three years in a row.

It was led by Jack Welch, you might remember him.

The guy who made shareholders gazillions of dollars and himself, while also firing

thousands of employees. They called him Neutron Jack because he would fire all of the humans

and the buildings would stay standing. Over the subsequent 20 years, the 129-year-old company

imploded slowly. It lost its AAA credit rating. It sold off all of the divisions, including the arm that made Saturday Night Live.

It was lampooned across many seasons of the hit show 30 Rock.

And eventually in the 2008 financial crisis, thanks to all of that debt that Jack Welch had taken on, it found itself in existential peril.

After that, there were attempts to rebuild the glorious world-spanning conglomerative old,

but let's just be frank about it, they failed miserably, and today GE announced the end of the dream.

The company is breaking up into three component parts, and as of 2023, it's basically no longer

going to exist. After the break, I'm going to speak to journalist Ted Mann. He literally

wrote the book about what went wrong at GE to find out, well, what went

wrong at GE.

Ted Man, author of the best book about the General Electric Decline and journalist at the Wall Street

Journalist at the Walsh ReCat.

Thanks for having me.

What's the sort of elevator pitch version of how GE managed to become so absolutely

...