War of the Welches reveals how much GE lights up his life
By Michael Powell
THE WASHINGTON POST
Thursday, November 7, 2002
NEW YORK -- Jack Welch is caught in the marital equivalent of a margin call. And it's left him with his golden boxers momentarily exposed.
It seems that the former General Electric chief executive officer cavorted adulterously and that this behavior annoyed Jane Welch, his now-estranged wife. She now aims to extract a divorce settlement equivalent to the gross national product of Luxembourg.
For reasons obscure but delicious, the Welches have decided to duke this out publicly in Connecticut Superior Court. Their latest court filings land like custom-dried cordwood atop the bonfire of corporate-greed scandals. Next week, Jack and Jane are expected to step into the main ring, appearing together for three days in a Bridgeport courtroom.
To be Jack Welch, retired chief executive officer, is to make do on $1,414,528 a month. It is to stumble home to a $10 million palazzo in Fairfield, Conn., or another $10 million pile of stones in Nantucket, Mass., a fishing town.
It is to turn on the GE-provided lamp with the GE-provided bulb and tear open the monthly income statements and read that your tax-exempt Elfun Fund holds $117,162,000. There's your Merrill Lynch Primary Account, with another $87,610,000, not to mention your Merrill Lynch Collateral Account with $34,860,000.
Your life is at courtside in Madison Square Garden, behind the Yankees dugout, on the grand-tier level at the Metropolitan Opera. You have a house account at Jean Georges, which Zagat calls that little "world class French dazzler" situated in the ornate lobby of One Central Park West, where you have a GE-paid pad.
You spend $10,000 or so each month on diamonds, and hundreds of dollars more on tips, although your generosity is entirely reimbursed by General Electric.
None of which is to suggest that Welch doesn't feel the pain of a nation come to straitened circumstances.
The net worth of "History's Most Acclaimed CEO" -- as his book blurb proclaims him -- has lost some altitude, just like everyone else. As he is heavily invested in the stock market, his total assets now top out at less than half a billion dollars ($456 million, if you must know . . . ).
Welch is a man of firm jawline and jaunty dress, and he has expounded in several books on his business philosophy. There are his Six Sigmas (the Cliff Notes version: Be nice but tough; be nonhierarchical but fly first class; be lean and clever; and always, always, always make a Big Pile of Dough).
He also talks about his concept of the Boundaryless Guidelines, and here one might fairly argue that he's walked this walk.
For his company-footed expenses know no bounds.
As laid out in the court filings, GE pays for Welch's helicopter and limousines. (His jet is no mere Gulfstream; he has access -- by contract -- to the company Boeing 737). The company pays for his laptop and desktop computers, his rental cars and homeowner's insurance, his lighting systems and wiring, his propane tanks, his security system and his emergency generator.
If he gets a DVD or CD, the company pays. Ditto for toilet paper, cologne and newspapers, and orchids and wine -- red, white and rosé. He has a personal computer technician, although the papers fail to state if said technician is housed on campus or if Welch must hail him -- with all the delay that surely entails.
The company pays for Welch's 11 country club memberships, although the man himself might (the papers are not clear on this point) pay his own caddie fees.
Now, some might leaf through these filings and feel their inner Jacobin hollering to get out. But one must stifle this urge.
If Welch is a bit of a satrap, he has created great stockholder value. And you can't call him a petty little grasper.
He's offered his soon-to-be ex-wife $50 million or more to be done with him. And when, some months back, news emerged about his GE-financed imperial lifestyle, he soon declared that he would renounce the fringe benefits and subsist on his very own half-billion-dollar nut.
Let the record show that Welch has always paid for his own umbrella -- albeit with a company discount.
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