John Legere unleashes tirade of utterly baffling attacks on rivals

Our favourite eccentric CEO John Legere recently had an interview with Business Insider and managed to spout a bunch of random/antagonistic/indecipherable stuff in his unique fashion.

It’s a running joke on the Telecoms.com podcast that John Legere is a bit of a character who loves calling out his rivals and straight up insulting them, but qualifying it all by saying he’s doing a stand up job growing T-Mobile. He does love a good dig though, and he couldn’t help himself when BI came calling.

Legere began with a lovely bit of schadenfreude – metaphorically pointing at Verizon and shouting “hah!” over its acquisition of Yahoo. It recently became public knowledge that Yahoo collaborated with US agencies to scan its users’ e-mails for keywords, and people are not happy about it. Oh no. Verizon reportedly wants a cool $1 billion knocked off the transaction value now that it’s discovering all these skeletons in Yahoo’s cupboard, which also include the revelation that Yahoo was the subject of one of the largest hacks in history.

“Verizon’s a bit more befuddled,” he said. “They’ve got the acquisition of iconic 1990s internet companies [AOL in 2015, Yahoo in 2016] and a leadership shift that’s going on now… Like oh my God, you not only bought Yahoo, but they’re a mess before you brought them in.”

Mid-rant, Legere (apparently pronounced “ledger”, not the French way we’d assumed) switched his attention to AT&T, and did a fantastic job of using a lot of words in a row which didn’t make any sense.

“If I hear one more time that in two quarters their over-the-top offers are coming out and life’s going to be grand … it’s to protect and defend their profit streams and play a different game in the future. But every now and then we get their attention, and then they decry us, and then it’s ‘me too,’ but it’s too late, and then it shifts”

What? If you can make any sense of that, send answers in on a postcard. We’ll give you a mensh.

Legere also slagged off Sprint about its finances and customer-base, letting his mouth run away from him before trying to retrospectively ignore his rival altogether.

“I don’t talk about them, ever,” he said after using a baffling metaphor about cooking eggs. “… people don’t fully comprehend that their economics and balance sheet have them on a timer for when you’re going to cook an egg or something.”

But it’s good to know Legere’s ego isn’t running the show. “Because in X amount of time I will be the largest wireless player in the country by a mile,” he said.

Oh, wait…