Nearly a week ago, in the aftermath of the news that
T-Mobile was about to bring in a new CEO to replace the departing Mike Sievert, we asked you whether the carrier’s new CEO will be able to improve the experiences of
T-Mobile‘s subscribers. 6.35% said that Srni Gopolan, the new CEO who will start on November 1st, will be able to make
T-Mobile better. 37.9% said that Gopolan will not be able to fix things at the wireless provider. A majority of the responses agreed that T-Mobile should go back to the past to improve its future.
Over 55% of you wanted former CEO John Legere to return to T-Mobile in the same role
55.75% selected the third option we gave readers, which was to bring back the CEO that made T-Mobile what it is today, John Legere. When he took over as CEO in 2012, the carrier was dead last among the Big 4 U.S. firms. It was the last to launch 3G and 4G in the U.S. When Legere joined T-Mobile, he turned around the company starting by branding it the Un-Carrier. He eliminated two-year contracts and subsidized phones. He also started the whole “On Us” trend of giving away free services to subscribers.
Music Freedom was the first “On Us” perk and it was announced in June 2014. T-Mobile subscribers could listen to unlimited music from certain music streamers like Pandora, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Rhapsody, Spotify, Slacker, and Milk Music without it counting against the subscriber’s monthly data allowance. Soon, Netflix On Us was next.
John was not your typical wireless executive
Legere didn’t look like a CEO with his long shoulder-length hair. He typically wore a magenta T-Mobile tee-shirt and covered his feet with sneakers. Legere was known to constantly put down T-Mobile‘s rivals calling Verizon and AT&T “Dumb and Dumber.” He released hilarious promotional videos that put down AT&T and Verizon. He even got into a Twitter battle one evening with the future two-time POTUS, Donald Trump.
In April 2015, weeks before Trump rose down the golden escalator to announce that he was running for president, Legere was staying in a Trump-owned hotel in Washington. Street musicians outside the hotel were annoying T-Mobile‘s CEO and he wrote a tweet complaining about the service at the hotel. Trump replied by firing back a tweet saying that T-Mobile service is terrible and that he didn’t want it in his buildings. In a later tweet, Trump insulted Legere’s hair.
Legere’s antics helped T-Mobile‘s popularity, and the carrier soon became the second-largest carrier in the nation. Under his leadership, T-Mobile made the decision to use mid-band spectrum to buildout its 5G network as opposed to the mmWave airwaves that Verizon and AT&T used at first. While mmWave spectrum is faster than mid-band, the signals do not travel that far. T-Mobile used the 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum it received in the $26.5 billion Sprint deal to take the lead in 5G, a lead it arguably has yet to give up. Verizon and AT&T were forced to spend tens of billions of dollars winning auctions for mid-band spectrum in the C-band in order to compete with T-Mobile.
Legere said he could run Twitter. Musk had a one-word response
The last time we heard from John Legere was in 2022 when Elon Musk was looking for a CEO to run Twitter (now “X”). Legere wrote, “I’m expensive but so is what you paid for Twitter.” Musk had a one-word reply, “No.”
Legere was fun to write about, and he did a masterful job. So masterful in fact, that in 2019 he was named the best wireless CEO by Glassdoor for the fifth consecutive year. That year he was also named the fourth best CEO in any industry. T-Mobile employees gave him a 99% rating, a score that I cannot see outgoing CEO Mike Sievert obtaining from employees at T-Mobile.
Every rep I’ve spoken with who was around during the Legere years told me that things went downhill after he left. But the truth is, as much as many of you would like to see him return, it will never happen. It’s the same reason why the Beatles didn’t reunite when they had the opportunity to. Or why you’ll never see a reboot of House MD. Once you’ve achieved something that you know cannot be repeated, it isn’t worth it to take that shot again.
The job that Legere did with T-Mobile was truly extraordinary. The wireless industry might never see a similar performance again. You might want him back as much as I do, but it is not going to happen. The one thing that I do miss with Legere gone is that I felt that he was the only wireless CEO who actually followed what was happening in the smartphone industry. Maybe it was an act, I hope it wasn’t. I felt that he was one of us, a phone enthusiast who happened to run the most innovative and fastest-growing wireless provider.
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