GE was one of the "50 years and a gold watch and a pension" firms for multiple generations of workers...under that now demised model, a laborer could hold a job with a single company for the length of a career, could grow and contribute and retire and share in the profits they helped create and generate over a lifetime with guaranteed income via pensions and benefits that covered former employees with group healthcare plans.

Greed (and the abysmal concept of a fiduciary responsibility to the 'shareholder') has killed this off forever now, and in the current climate of hyper-consolidation and mergers, it looks highly unlikely it will ever swing in another direction. Unregulated capitalism is an evil presence in civilization...one that will either be reigned in or it will destroy humanity.

A sad day indeed...

It effectively swings the doors wide open for uncontrolled greed and avarice.

then left with a golden parachute of millions?

I still remember how he repeatedly went on TV calling the Obama admin's continually improving unemployment numbers lies.

Goes to show you. Even the guys at the top can make really big, long lasting mistakes.

Paid their fair share of taxes here in the US I'd be a bit more sympathetic.

https://www.factcheck.org/2012/04/warren-ge-pays-no-taxes/

US Steel's Market Cap = $6.29B
Comcast Market Cap = $157.0B

So the market values an entertainment company over 25x more than a heavy manufacturing company. ...and guess which company we're bending over backwards to help?

and went willy nilly into all sorts of "business" (GE Finance, GE Healthcare, GE Media/Entertainment, GE whatever....). And at the end, they finally crept back to appliances again but it was too late.

Sold it to Chinese company Haier in 2016.

However as part of that, their name still appears on those appliances and the "brand" continues out in the consumer sphere. It's just like how AT&T (Ma Bell) was broken up and became the "Baby Bells" and eventually some of them merged (in one case, to form Verizon) and another eventually took the "AT&T" name back for itself. Unless you lived through (or followed or researched) the convoluted history of that, you wouldn't know any difference.

but not so many shares that I'm ruined or anything.

Amazing, just amazing. How could GE have ended up like this? I'm underwater a little, but I hadn't been buying at the peaks anyway.

If it's any consolation, sometimes the "Dogs of the Dow" theory works.

The Dogs of the Dow is an investment strategy popularized by Michael B. O'Higgins in 1991, which proposes that an investor annually select for investment the ten Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stocks whose dividend is the highest fraction of their price.