Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

by William D. Cohan

he told me that he “loved them to pieces” but that he had made “a mistake” when he gave each of them a bunch of GE stock when he first became CEO. Given how well the stock performed under his tenure, each of the kids ended up with something like $50 million in GE stock, half when they turned thirty-five, the other half when they turned forty-five. Each of them quit their jobs, he told me, as a result, despite two of the four going to Harvard Business School and one going to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “They turned out differently than I’d hoped,” he said. “We’re close. But they got too much money. I thought half at thirty-five and half at forty-five was the right thing. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have given it to them. Who would know?”