Things are going well for wireless carrier T-Mobile these days. A second-quarter earnings report confirmed the company added 1.5 million new subscribers, pushing it to the top of the list of customers carried.
Achieving $391 million in profit from revenue of $7.2 billion and industry-leading revenue growth of 8 percent year-over-year puts a sparkle in shareholders' eyes as well.
"We have completely reversed T-Mobile's trajectory and started a revolution that is changing the rules in wireless," said T-Mobile President and CEO John Legere.
Conversely, rival Sprint has slowed to a crawl, with subscriber losses and network upgrade rollout problems.
Sprint just replaced CEO Daniel Hesse in a move that coincided with Sprint's parent company, SoftBank Corp. of Japan, deciding to squash a proposed merger with T-Mobile, citing the need to shore up Sprint's sagging revenue and to avoid a long, protracted fight with regulators. That battle was shaping up as expensive and likely not victorious.
So it's not too suprising Legere is celebrating both T-Mobile's successes and Sprint's struggles by taking to Twitter to dish out some schadenfreude toward his one-time possible merger partner.
Legere unleashed a torrent of snarky Tweets last week in a kind of "scream of consciousness"- style attack on Sprint's misfortunes, its marketing programs and its new CEO, Marcelo Claure. Legere did not hold anything back. He began with "If you needed just one more reason to leave Sprint and join T-Mobile...now you might just have it...total Chaos at Sprint! #sprintlikehell."
A Tweet mocking Claure soon followed: "Pro tip for @marceloclaure, tell people how to pronounce your name now...#leegair!?", an apparent reference to the frequent mispronunciation of Legere's name, which he says should be "ledger."
In another tweet, Legere seemed to poke fun at Sprint for hiring Claure from within the company, with "looks like @sprint has a new #framily member...and he's got a lot of framily therapy to do, asap. #justsayin.
More niceties followed, such as "is Sprint a melting ice cube?...looks like it to me...join the cool brand NOW! #T-Mobile #unleash; and this, "join T-Mobile now and jump off the Sprint bus before it crashes! #framily #unleash.
By all this, one can reasonably assume that if there was any flicker of hope that the Sprint-T-Mobile merger could still happen, that ember has been extinguished. It may also be possible Legere's business education included Management by Ego training.
Legere, 55, joined T-Mobile in September 2012 as president and CEO. He brought to T-Mobile over 32 years' experience in U.S. and global telecommunications and technology industries. Ironically, earlier in his career, Legere worked under now-deposed Sprint CEO Daniel Hesse.
