Life and Career
Immelt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Donna Rosemary (née Wallace), a school teacher, and Joseph Francis Immelt, who managed the General Electric Aircraft Engines Division. Immelt attended Finneytown High School; he played football in college and was an offensive tackle. He holds an B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Dartmouth College where he currently serves on the board of trustees and was president of his fraternity, Phi Delta Alpha. Immelt also received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He has been with GE since 1982 and is on the board of two non-profit organizations, one of which is the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization which attempts to alleviate problems caused by poverty in New York City. He served as Chairman of The Business Council in 2005 and 2006.
His tenure as chairman and CEO started off on a low note - he took over the role on September 7, 2001, just four days before the terrorist attacks on the United States, which killed two employees and cost GE's insurance business $600 million, as well as having a direct effect on the company's Aircraft Engines sector. Immelt has a total five year compensation of $53.82 million, an income which ranked sixth among executives employed by US-based conglomerates. Immelt was named to Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. Since taking over, GE's stock has dropped nearly 60%. General Electric has closed more than 31 plants since 2008 and let go of more than 19,000 employees, but Immelt still took home $15.2 million in 2011. Recently, Immelt has been criticized by Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly for business transactions between GE and Iran, the country which has reportedly been attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. O'Reilly went as far as to say, "If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt". GE's website claims that the company stopped doing business in Iran in 2005 (and finished all contracts by 2008). In a May 2012 column in Forbes magazine, Adam Hartung listed Immelt as the fourth worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company, saying he had "no vision to propel GE’s growth, and should have been gone by 2010," after GE's stock dropped from $60 in 2000 to $19 in 2012 (2/3 from when Immelt took the CEO position).
According to documents filed with the Federal Elections Commission, Immelt lives with his wife Andrea in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Read more about this topic: Jeffrey R. Immelt
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