Former General Electric C.E.O. Jack Welch is not exactly known for his missed opportunities. The legendary businessman sat at the helm of one of the country’s most iconic companies for nearly a quarter century, and during that time, GE’s value rose 4,000 percent, as a result of Welch’s constant acquisitions and relentless cost-cutting.
But Welch’s record is allegedly marred by one huge black mark. According to a new memoir from Bob Wright, the longtime head of NBCUniversal who worked alongside Welch, the executive passed up the chance to buy Apple for a bargain basement price. Wright told the New York Post that then–Apple chief Michael Spindler approached GE in 1996, as the tech giant struggled to regain its footing in the absence of Steve Jobs, handing Welch the opportunity to buy Apple for $2 billion.
“The stock price was $20, and [Spindler] was explaining he couldn’t get the company moving fast enough and the analysts were on his case,” Wright told the Post. “He was sweating like mad and everybody said, ‘We can’t manage technology like that.’”
So they walked away. Apple is now worth more than $700 billion, more than 300 times what Welch could have bought it for. GE, by contrast, is worth less than half of that.
Last year, Welch reportedly told a group at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management about taking his daughter to get her broken iPhone fixed at an Apple store. He was so impressed by the fixed phone, and the store manager’s ability to lead a group of technical employees when he, himself, had no expertise in the area, that he grilled the young man about how he does it. “The manager told him that he’s concerned with only two things: how engaged his employees are and if his customers are smiling once they get their repaired gadgets back. He didn’t need to understand the technology,” according to an account of the talk by M.I.T.
If only the now 80-year-old Welch had met this young Apple employee two decades earlier and listened to his advice, he would be a far, far richer man. Then again, Apple would probably not still exist.
