Twitter is a platform known for ruffled feathers in the business world, especially when it comes to the wireless industry. One of the biggest reasons for that reputation is none other than T-Mobile CEO John Legere. His Tweets are numerous, and come plenty fast. Often, these short messages end up sparking some sort of controversy, or he outright fights with people on Twitter; it wasn’t terribly long ago, in fact, that he managed to get into a spat with Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure. Now, that same CEO is exchanging kind words with T-Mobile’s chief financial officer, Braxton Carter. The two went back and forth with praise for one another and their respective companies.
The whole thing started with a Tweet by Fierce Wireless, highlighting Mr. Carter praising Sprint during a recent media appearance. Mr. Claure replied to the Tweet by tagging Carter directly and admitting that Sprint may be taking a page or two from T-Mobile’s book. Braxton Carter finished the exchange by offering to take the fight to the “duopoly” hand in hand, referring to Verizon and AT&T. In a somewhat out of character moment, CEO John Legere missed out on the interaction, leaving Braxton Carter and Marcelo Claure to end the exchange at that point and leave off on a positive and hopeful note. While he would probably not have necessarily stirred up controversy or said anything negative, a conversation between executives of his company and a rival’s is a pretty obvious chance for some positive press.
While the two companies haven’t exactly been at each other’s throats, whispers of an impending merger may be at least partially to blame for the about-face from the nastiness and generally ignoring one another of yesteryear. The original praise by Carter was over Sprint’s turnaround of their financial situation and decent subscriber gain in recent quarters, a feat that has certainly not gone unnoticed in a wireless industry that had all but written them off once T-Mobile upped their game and surpassed them. While talks of a merger seem to have stalled at this point, speculation is running rampant that the incoming Trump administration will look much more kindly on such arrangements, perhaps allowing the US mobile space to become a trifecta, with the two little guys uniting to fight the “duopoly”, just as Carter said in his reply.