T-Mobile CEO John Legere’s playful nature of cracking jokes via tweet has become something to almost expect. He often makes jokes aimed at his rival competing wireless carriers, sometimes they’re directed at the CEO like past tweets giving gentle ribbings to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, while other times they’re directed at the companies themselves. Like in one of Legere’s more recent tweets where he asks Sprint what else T-mobile would have to do so Sprint could copy it. This kind of back and forth has long been one of the finer points of following John Legere on Twitter, for me personally at least as some of them come out pretty funny.
You would think that some of the responses would rattle the other executives, but with the tweet from yesterday Dan Hesse seemed to have taken it surprisingly well instead of getting offended. In an interview with Bloomberg he told them that he doesn’t think that John Legere will ever stop egging him on. This probably isn’t the same response that everybody would give, but Dan Hesse remarks that he sees Leger as a peer which is probably why he took it with a little more of thick skin. This is also in light of recent rumors spreading around that John Legere could potentially be the popular vote to replace Hesse and take over the Sprint/T-Mobile merged company should the acquisition ever end up happening.
Whether Legere would take over for Hesse or not, doesn’t seem to phase him either though. He comments in the interview that consumers would benefit from a merger between both the bottom contenders out of the major 4 wireless carriers, which could end up providing AT&T and Verizon Wireless with tougher competition. Among much of the talks surrounding the merger, Hesse makes a point that the U.S. wireless industry is more comprised of a Duopoly rather than a big 4, and that the merger would lead to a stronger number 3 carrier and an overall healthier wireless industry geared towards the benefits of the consumer. There are many skeptical that the merger will ever even begin to take place, and if Sprint’s parent company Softbank ever makes an offer, T-Mobile and Sprint will both have a good little fight ahead of them.