Word: ge
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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These issues came into focus for me as I marveled at the extraordinary pay package unveiled last week for former GE executive Gary Wendt, the new boss at Conseco, whose high-profile divorce in 1997 became a test for the worth of a dutiful corporate wife. Some would say the position pays quite well, thank you. Lorna Wendt got $20 million in parting. Yet that's barely 15% of her estimate of her husband's net worth at the time. She has appealed and seeks an additional $35 million...
...that sounds greedy, consider her husband's five-year deal to serve as CEO of this beleaguered insurance company. Wendt landed a $45 million signing bonus and a guaranteed bonus of up to $50 million in two years--although he did forfeit some GE incentive money. He will also be getting stock, stock options and, oh yeah, a salary of many millions more. His ex will get none of it. As noted, Lorna Wendt won't go begging. But the man she spent 32 years with is now, just a few years removed, infinitely more wealthy than...
This feeling of solidarity grew online long after the last splinters of glass from Seattle's vandalized Starbucks had been cleaned up. While their foes were busy checking real-time quotes for Intel and GE, the antiglobalists were swapping digital photos of police brutality, reading Noam Chomsky's essays on media brainwashing and posting tips on defending against pepper spray (wear a handkerchief soaked in vinegar). The irony of all this is stark, and possibly galling to the technocrats: the Web was supposed to be globalism's great tool, not a forum for its enemies. The Web was supposed...
...Microsoft, were useful indicators. Microsoft's emergence bespoke information technology as the driving force in our economy, supplanting consumer goods, aerospace and financial services as the sectors that investors most expected to outperform the rest of the market. The same point could have been made in 1993, when GE surpassed Exxon (consumer goods trumped oil), or a hundred years ago, when John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a monopolistic market bully and trust-busting wasn't even a slogan for Teddy Roosevelt...
Here, then, is the guts of the issue. If Jack Welch of GE, whom I've never met, were nonetheless to appear at my door and say, "I hear you're writing about the AOL-Time Warner merger. I hope you'll keep in mind that I'm CEO of the company that co-owns a cable channel and a website with the company that writes your paycheck, and the company you're writing about owns a magazine that published a damned fine picture of me recently," would I have the ethical backbone to say, "Obviously that occurred...