The Worth of NBC as a Piece of GE

General Electric at long last appears ready to part with NBC Universal, the media and entertainment business it assembled through 24 years of management effort — and at least $33 billion of shareholders' money. A deal in the works with the cable operator Comcast that could value NBC at around $24 billion wouldn't be a big disaster. But it would hardly qualify as an advertisement for G.E.'s vaunted management and capital allocation skills: when the value of all the transactions undertaken by NBC is added up, it comes to at least $33 billion, according to Dealogic data. That includes partial stakes in assets like the Weather Channel. That means G.E. may have paid billions of dollars more over the years to build NBC than it will get back.