The f-bomb dropping, maverick CEO of T-Mobile

Kaja Whitehouse | USA TODAY

NEW YORK — He's a brash braggart who's been kicked out of parties. He drops F-bombs with ease and enjoys a good Twitter brawl.

This isn't some rowdy frat boy. This is John Legere, the CEO of wireless company T-Mobile.

Last week, Legere (pronounced "ledger") proved his unconventional style is more than just a sideshow when, for the first time in recent history, T-Mobile officially slid past Sprint to become the nation's third-largest wireless carrier.

T-Mobile just ended its June quarter with 58.9 million customers, representing growth of 77% over the second-quarter of 2012, before Legere joined. Sprint, by contrast, reported 57.7 "connections," an industry term for measuring customers, when it reported earnings Tuesday.

Taking the No. 3 slot was not easy. When Legere joined T-Mobile in September 2012, the unit of Deutsche Telekom had just 33.16 million customers, well below Sprint's 56.38 million connections, according to data from industry tracker GSMA Intelligence.

T-Mobile was also leaking customers at the time. A few months before Legere took over, T-Mobile reported 33.16 million customers, down from 33.58 million a year earlier — and 33.62 million the year before that, according to GSMA.

"When John came to T-Mobile, that thing was on life support. People were running away from it," said Roger Entner, a telecom analyst with Recon Analytics.

Legere, 57, breathed new life into the company with his "un-carrier" strategy — an aggressive, in-your-face marketing campaign that seeks to eliminate hidden fees and burdensome two-year contracts. Among the perks have been unlimited streaming music, unlimited calls to Mexico and Canada from the U.S., and money for customers to break their contracts with other carriers.

Attracting customers with noise and freebies

The ideas behind un-carrier aren't unique to Legere. The management team right before him dabbled with similar projects to draw in customers by slashing prices. T-Mobile's July 2011 "Value Plan," for example, offered unlimited talk, unlimited text and unlimited data for just $49.99 per line for up to two lines.

But the "Value Plan" was marketed no differently than any other T-Mobile promotion, and therefore it didn't attract the attention Legere has provided the un-carrier strategy, analysts and former employees said.

"We were trying different things but we were not jumping in the deep-end of the pool," recalled former T-Mobile executive Suzanne Lowry of the era before Legere. "We were not committed to being the 'un-carrier,'" said Lowry, who was a vice president at T-Mobile from 2010 to 2013 and director of marketing before that.

Legere, by contrast, has made better pricing and freebies part of T-Mobile's brand.

"Like him or not, he (Legere) knew the position T-Mobile was in — hemorrhaging customers — and he said we can't continue to compete by being a 'hey, me-too' company," said Lowry, who is now a professional volleyball referee. "It was one of the most amazing turnaround stories I have ever been a part of."

Legere declined, through a spokeswoman, to be interviewed for this article or answer emailed questions.

Legere doesn't just challenge the competition on pricing. He insults them while doing it. He refers to AT&T and Verizon as "dumb and dumber" and uses phrases like #phoneshame and #carriershame!! on Twitter to describe their business practices.

A 'regular' guy — and millionaire

The insults are far from gratuitous. They have allowed Legere to cultivate an image as a consumer champion seeking to upend an industry despised for complicated bills riddled with unforeseen fees.

Legere's competitors have proved easy foils. In 2014, he was kicked out of the AT&T party at CES, the annual consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, for being an interloper. The move attracted mainstream attention, including a a blurb in the Page Six gossip section of the New York Post. "His brazen move was a hit on Twitter," the tabloid declared.

"What he communicates very effectively is authenticity," said Entner, the a telecom analyst. "He comes across as a guy like you and me, really nice. And hey, by the way, he's a CEO and makes millions of dollars."

Last year, Legere earned $18.56 million, down from the $29.24 million he earned in 2013, according to regulatory filings. He is divorced with two daughters, and an avid runner. Last year, he ran the Boston Marathon in 5 hours and 3 minutes, raising $400,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He often talks to his massive online fan base via Periscope, a streaming video app, while jogging. He highlights his maverick image with a uniform of shaggy hair, jeans, sneakers and his now-iconic magenta pink T-Mobile T-shirt.

Despite his reputation as an industry outsider, Legere has two decades of experience in the telecom industry, including working for AT&T through much of the 1990s. He ran telecom company Asia Global Crossing as CEO from 2000 to 2002, and was CEO of the parent company, Global Crossing from 2001 until its sale to Level 3 Communications in 2011.

Past as a ruthless cost-cutter

Legere earned a reputation as a ruthless cost-cutter at Global Crossing, which filed for bankruptcy in Jan. 2002 amid industry-wide pricing woes. "By the time he was CEO, the cards were played," said Peter DeNagy, a Global Crossing vice president at the time. "He didn't cause that problem," said DeNagy, who is now a mobile and Internet consultant at Acommence Advisors.

Still, the bankruptcy led to a Congressional hearing amid concerns about the company's accounting practices and losses suffered by employees. Under Legere, laid-off employees saw their severance benefits terminated and employees lost money in their retirement plans, which were loaded up with company stock, according to a transcript of the March 2002 hearing.

Legere, by contrast, earned a salary of $1.1 million salary and $3.5 million signing bonus just a few months earlier, one member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations was quick to point out. Global Crossing and Asia Global Crossing also forgave millions in loans to executives, including Legere, according to reports at the time.

Interviews with former employees revealed Legere to be a demanding boss. He has been known to make middle-of-the-night business calls and respond angrily when employees don't respond to his emails quickly, according to two former senior employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution since they still work in the telecom industry.

Legere didn't respond to requests for comment about such complaints.

Bleeding magenta pink

Legere's hard-driving management style was also lauded by some employees.

Nathan Peterson, who worked as T-Mobile social media manager from 2011 to 2014, recalled with pride the hard work that went into the company's first CES show in 2013, which resulted in Legere's now infamous T-Mobile T-shirt. Peterson recalled that Legere phoned a co-worker "in the middle of the night and said, 'I want a magenta pink T-Mobile T-shirt'" to wear at the press conference, he said.

The employee got it done, and the T-shirt was a success, said Peterson, who now works for mobile storytelling platform Stqry.

"He was an absolutely inspirational character," Peterson said of Legere. "He made it known to his staff that he bleeds the color magenta pink. That's the impression we had, that's for sure."

T-Mobile's growth has been "remarkable" but "it's not the end of the story," said John Jackson, mobile analyst with research firm IDC. "There is a lot of calculating going on over how long they can continue to cut rates on data and compete in this way," Jackson said.

The industry continues to fear that aggressive price cutting will result in customers who cost carriers money by jumping from carrier to the next, thus forcing even further price reductions to attract new subscribers, analysts said.

For now, T-Mobile investors face no such concerns. In the second-quarter ended in June, T-Mobile reported earnings of $361 million, or 42 cents per share, down from last year's profits of 48 cents a share, but beating Wall Street's expectations for 19 cents a share, according to FactSet data.

Revenue came in at $8.2 billion, up a whopping 14% from the second-quarter of 2014, and up 70% from $4.8 billion T-Mobile posted in the second-quarter of 2012.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Kaja Whitehouse on Twitter: @kajawhitehouse