Verizon and AT&T probably aren’t fans of Sprint’s plan to buy T-Mobile and now they have yet another reason to hate it: Apparently it will make T-Mobile CEO John Legere more powerful. Bloomberg’s sources say that Legere, the notoriously foul-mouthed CEO with a reputation for shameless publicity stunts, will stay on as CEO of a newly merged Sprint and T-Mobile if the two companies’ reported $32 billion merger proposal passes regulatory inspection. Jonathan Chaplin, an analyst at New Street Research, tells Bloomberg that giving Legere this additional power will make him “twice as crazy” because he’ll have “double the asset base to work with.”
As Sprint (S) Corp. nears an agreement to buy T-Mobile (TMUS) US Inc., the man in the hot pink T-shirt will soon step into the limelight. John Legere, the chief executive officer of T-Mobile who’s known for wearing company-branded shirts and taunting his competitors on Twitter, is likely to run the combined company, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. He’s being favored over Dan Hesse, the 60-year-old CEO of Sprint, who took over a broken company in 2007 and did enough fixing, even while operating at a loss, to attract a new owner last year. As negotiators hammer out the finer points of an agreement, Legere will increasingly be responsible for the prospects of an enlarged company. It would fall to him to integrate disparate management teams and divergent marketing strategies, while also combining two networks that are years behind the technological advances of their biggest rivals, AT&T Inc. (T) and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)
