Jack Welch, who led General Electric through two decades of extraordinary corporate prosperity and became the most influential business manager of his generation, has died. He was 84.

The cause was renal failure, his wife, Suzy Welch, said.

Combative and blunt, Welch became the chief executive of General Electric in 1981, a few months after Ronald Reagan took office as president. It was a time of outsize gains for many of America’s big, multinational corporations and their leaders, who were helped by lower taxes and pro-business policies.

GE led the pack. The company’s revenue jumped nearly fivefold, to $130 billion, during Welch’s tenure, while the value of its shares on the stock market soared from $14 billion to more than $410 billion.

It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named GE the “World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.

Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time.

“Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.