And while the two were both politically conservative, Welch was more of a country-club Republican, partial to golf and no fan — at least earlier on — of Donald Trump. While a savvy political operator, Welch was unlikely to have decamped to Mar-a-Lago to personally and intensely cozy up to the president-elect, as Musk did. (In 2016, Welch withdrew his support for Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, writing on social media, “Unfortunately, wrong messenger…Party must change nominee now.”)
But the two shared a common business philosophy: Cut as much fat as possible.
Welch believed G.E. had become too bureaucratic and bloated. He slashed billions of dollars in costs, and prided himself on weeding out employees who just weren’t making it. He became an apostle of the Six Sigma approach, inspiring other C.E.O.s. Corporate profits — and G.E.’s stock price — exploded under his watch.
That won Welch acclaim from investors and surviving employees. Consider this: When he became G.E.’s chief in 1981, its market value was $12 billion. At his departure, right before Sept. 11, 2001, that had grown to some $650 billion, making the conglomerate the world’s most valuable company by many stretches. G.E. became known as an incubator of top managerial talent, with alumni becoming C.E.O.s of many Fortune 500 companies. But it also made Welch a polarizing figure: He became known in many circles as “Neutron Jack,” a moniker he despised.
Musk essentially took Welch’s playbook into overdrive. The social network now known as X operates with just 25 percent of the work force it had when he acquired it in 2022. Tales of his relentless cost-cutting at Tesla and SpaceX are the stuff of biographies, and they can now be seen at work in the Trump administration. And Musk has made no apologies for his approach, acknowledging that he has had to sometimes rehire workers in crucial roles.
That approach has certainly cost Musk some popularity among much of the general public recently, and he still faces lawsuits from aggrieved former employees of X. But investors have snapped up debt in X at par, seemingly hopeful that the company’s prospects are on the mend. And he has seemingly inspired counterparts at Meta, Google, Amazon and beyond to rethink how to get by with less — much less. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has openly spoken about cutting “low performers”; shares in the parent company of Instagram and Facebook have increased nearly 50 percent in the past year, putting its market value at nearly $2 trillion. Similar conversations are going on throughout Hollywood and on Wall Street.
