“THE FUCKERS HATE YOU.”
“I CAN’T WAIT TO WATCH THE PECKERS SCREAM AND CRY.”
“I’M BOMBING THEIR FACTORIES.”
Action-movie villains spit this kind of venom. Comedy writers hurl similarly foul tirades at one another. And as the sony email hack revealed, business executives can speak this way too. In private.
But in the open, CEOs - particularly those running multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies - present a soothing stream of bromides, buzzwords, and nonanswers. All except John Legere, the man responsible for those quotes. At a downtown Manhattan loft this past March, the club music thumps as a crowd of telecom analysts and press wait expectantly for the CEO of T-Mobile to spew his gutter talk. He does not disappoint. Legere, 57, takes the stage at “Un-carrier 9.0,” the latest in a series of T-Mobile news events, wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt emblazoned with a hot pink T on the chest. On his feet: hot pink skater sneakers. With his wave of shoulder-length brown hair and mild paunch protruding from what was once an athletic physique, Legere looks like he might have been a member of Kiss rather than a lifelong telecom executive. Once he starts talking, he becomes the anthropomorphized embodiment of the tall can of Red Bull in his left hand.
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