View the moment when John Legere started T-Mobile's amazing turnaround

When I first started writing for PhoneArena back in 2009, T-Mobile was the nation's fourth-largest wireless carrier after Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. Fifteen years later, T-Mobile has become the nation's fastest-growing and most innovative of the three major wireless U.S. firms. And now, it is second in customer accounts after Verizon. What changed? T-Mobile hired a new CEO named John Legere in September 2012 and he was a breath of fresh air.

Legere was not your typical executive. He wore his hair rock star long and eschewed expensive suits and ties for T-Mobile t-shirts, and jackets, and he preferred wearing sneakers. He also was pro consumer and he appeared to be a smartphone fan unlike many of the CEOs in the industry. In June 2019, he was named the top CEO in the U.S. wireless industry by Glassdoor for the fifth consecutive year. He also finished an impressive fourth among U.S. CEOs in all industries.

While Legere had been known to insiders in the wireless business before joining T-Mobile, his first big moment with the company he named the Un-carrier came in January 2013 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Running T-Mobile for less than 4 months at the time, Legere was on stage discussing how T-Mobile's service in New York City was better than the service that Verizon and AT&T were delivering in the Big Apple.

An AT&T customer in the audience reveals that he isn't happy with this service in New York City which led Legere to call AT&T's network "crap." It was the moment that John Legere put the other U.S. wireless firms, consumers, and the media on notice that T-Mobile was not going to be kicked around any more. By the time Legere left T-Mobile, he had completely turned around the company and finished his work at T-Mobile by overseeing the $26 billion acquisition of Sprint, the deal that made T-Mobile arguably the 5G leader in the states.

No executive in the industry came out so strongly against his competitors than Legere. After all, the executive was known to call AT&T and Verizon "Dumb and Dumber." At the time of his CES appearance in 2013, his comment about AT&T's network was considered to be shocking. But from this moment on, the media would not ignore John Legere or T-Mobile.