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.”
But although Legere would certainly relish the chance to run an even bigger wireless company and make even bigger money, it won’t be all about Macklemore concerts. Sprint’s merger with Nextel last decade was one of the telecom industry’s most infamous debacles and Bloomberg says that it’s going to be Legere’s responsibility to make sure something similar doesn’t happen again. Among his many challenges, Bloomberg says Legere will need “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” Verizon and AT&T.
