T-Mobile CEO John Legere deletes controversial tweets

Edward C. Baig | USA TODAY

NEW YORK -- T-Mobile CEO John Legere has a reputation for being brash on social media.

After a Wednesday evening report said that his company was in merger talks with Dish Network, Legere published a series of controversial tweets, going as far as blasting a journalist. But some of those tweets soon disappeared from his feed.

While those comments are gone from his @JohnLegere account, they can still be found in the digital world. And they caught the attention of some, raising questions about the propriety of a CEO leveling attacks on social media in the middle of supposed merger talks.

A CEO of a public company, such as T-Mobile, has to be "particularly sensitive because what you say and do has the potential to impact your shareholders," Democratic political consultant and crisis communications expert Chris Lehane says. "Anytime you're going on a social media platform, whether you're 18 or a CEO, you have to ask how comfortable are with you with something that may appear on the front page of your local newspaper. You can live by the tweet and die by the tweet."

Neither Legere nor his Dish Network CEO counterpart, Charlie Ergen, have commented on the Wednesday Wall Street Journal report that the companies are in merger talks.

But Legere, who is highly active on social media and has 1.41 million Twitter followers, left several clues on Twitter, including some tweets that remain and some tweets that were subsequently removed.

Legere tweeted a smiley face emoticon in response to a tweet from @alexrubalcava that said, "The only thing better than @johnlegere running a mobile phone company would be if he ran an entertainment company."

That tweet is still up.

Legere, who is at the helm of the nation's fourth-largest wireless carrier, posted angrier responses in some since-removed tweets. Responding to a Re/code article suggesting that the deal is "akin to two people who hook up because they are the last ones left in the bar at closing time," Legere wrote: "Snarky sensational and shallow look at a rumor that deserves no comment."

Ina Fried, who wrote the Re/code piece, told USA TODAY, "I thought my piece was a fair analysis of the situation. Both companies have tried but failed to complete several other transactions. That said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion and should feel free to share it."

When tech journalist Harry McCracken asked on Twitter, "If Dish and T-Mobile merge, will @JohnLegere refer to Comcast and DirecTV as Shemp and Curly Joe? Hope so". Legere responded with "big and soulless or large and empty orrrr boring and old and well as dinosaurs." That response was also pulled down.

"I was surprised to see him respond but less so than I would have been with any other CEO in America. He's John Legere!," McCracken says

T-Mobile refused to comment on why the tweets were removed.

This is probably not the kind of attention even this attention-seeking CEO had in mind. Legere who famously crashed an AT&T party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2014, was conspicuously mum in the aftermath of his Twitter rant.

"You can't take back what you said. People already saw it," says Dave Kerpen, a social media expert and CEO of software company Likeable Local. "All that is doing now is make you look like you're hiding something or having second thoughts."

Tweets deleted by users can still be found with a little detective work. But it's more challenging to find deleted tweets than it used to be.

Twitter is cracking down on third-party developers who access the company's fire hose of tweets to resurface deleted tweets, calling it a privacy issue. Twitter says doing so violates its agreement with developers.

"Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us," Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler said in a statement.

Meantime, more circumstantial evidence that deal talks with Dish are ongoing came from T-Mobile USA Chief Operating Officer Mike Sievert, who tweeted that he is in Denver, "where our ‪@TMobile team is slightly crazy & more than slightly awesome."

Dish is headquartered in nearby Meridian, Colo. Legere made the tweet a favorite.

Contributing: Eli Blumenthal and Jessica Guynn.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow @edbaig on Twitter