GE Stock Hits Its First All-Time High in Decades. It Took 9,150 Days.

A GE Aerospace GE9X engine is pictured on a Boeing 777X airplane. Coming into Tuesday trading, GE Aerospace stock was up about 72% year to date. (JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

It took 9,150 days, but GE Aerospace stock hit a new all-time high. It’s the first record since 2000.

Shares traded as high as $294.74 Tuesday before closing at $292.97, up 2.2%. GE, which is now GE Aerospace, last hit an intraday high of $289.54 on Aug. 28, 2000, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Shares closed at $287.15 that day, the prior all-time closing high.

Back then, Janet Jackson and N’Sync topped Billboard charts. Mission Impossible II was a summer blockbuster. (The eighth Mission Impossible was released in 2025.) The S&P 500 sat at roughly 1500.

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It has been a long road back for the company. Shares traded below $40 in late 2018, shortly after new CEO Larry Culp arrived in the middle of management turmoil, high debt levels, and deteriorating earnings. Shares traded below $30 in 2020 during the Covid-induced aerospace slowdown.

Culp paid down some $100 billion in debt, refocused operations, and stabilized the organization. All of which has paid off. Now, investors don’t dwell on the past. Instead, they look to the future, with commercial jet demand about as good as it has ever been.

Airlines are waiting for some 14,000 planes from Boeing and Airbus . That’s more than 10 years of demand at current build rates. Roughly three-quarters of the engines powering those jets will come from GE Aerospace or its 50/50 joint venture with Safran. GE also makes a lot of money servicing the engines already flying.

Culp also broke the company into three parts. While GE Aerospace stock is at a record high, its market capitalization isn’t. It sits at about $310 billion—making it the most valuable industrial company in the U.S.

It isn’t a record, though. GE was worth about $600 billion in August 2000. The stock’s high, unadjusted for any splits, was $60.50, and GE had just over 9.9 billion shares outstanding, according to the 2000 annual report. Today, GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, and GE HealthCare Technologies are worth about $514 billion. That’s the next record for investors to watch.

Still, eclipsing the old high for GE stock is a feat after 25-plus years.

As for where shares go from here, Wall Street’s average price target for GE stock is about $303. Analyst price targets, however, tend to rise over time. The average analyst price target for GE shares was about $200 one year ago.

GE Aerospace stock is up about 72% this year, about 60 percentage points ahead of the S&P 500 , boosted by increasing demand for commercial jets.

Corrections & Amplifications

GE Aerospace stock has outperformed the S&P 500 by about 60 percentage points this year. A previous version of the article incorrectly said 84 percentage points.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com