After 5-and-a-half years as T-Mobile’s CEO, Mike Sievert will step down from the role on Nov. 1 — succeeded by current Chief Operating Officer Srini Gopalan, who will look to continue building on the resurgence sparked by John Legere more than a decade ago.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless company made the surprise announcement Monday morning. Sievert, 56, will become vice chairman of T-Mobile and its board, remaining on the management team to advise the company’s leaders in key strategic areas, the company said.
Gopalan, 54, joined T-Mobile as COO in 2023 after five years on the board. He previously led Deutsche Telekom’s Germany business, where he doubled growth and expanded its fiber network. He also held senior roles at Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, and Capital One.
Once the scrappy outsider, T-Mobile is now the largest U.S. telecom company by market capitalization, ahead of AT&T and Verizon. When Legere took over in 2012, the company was a distant No. 4 in the wireless industry. It used its “Un-carrier” strategy and a hard-won merger with Sprint to disrupt the market with lower prices, network gains, and customer perks.
In June of this year, T-Mobile declared its network the best in the nation, citing independent testing. Speaking with GeekWire after that announcement, Gopalan emphasized “liberating customers from false choices” — the perceived trade-offs between network quality and value — and expressed confidence in T-Mobile’s ability to lead the market well into the future.
“We are so far ahead, and we’re in such a good position to lead, not just in 5G but in 6G, as well,” Gopalan said, citing factors including its head start in deploying a 5G standalone core, its spectrum holdings, and technical advantages such as uplink carrier aggregation at 2.5 GHz.
Gopalan spoke about joining T-Mobile as a relative newcomer and being struck by the company’s passion and drive. He credited earlier leadership teams for achieving so much even as they were “playing with one hand tied behind their back,” as he put it.
Sievert, a 13-year veteran of the company, has been a central figure during the Un-carrier era. Over his tenure, T-Mobile has grown from fewer than 30 million customers to more than 130 million. He previously worked at Microsoft, AT&T, E-Trade, IBM, and Procter & Gamble.
Appearing with Gopalan on CNBC after the announcement Monday morning, Sievert was asked about the timing of his decision to step down, given that he still has many years left in his own career. He said the move was driven by the fact that Gopalan is ready to lead.
True to form, Sievert leaned on superlatives — saying it’s T-Mobile’s philosophy to pass the baton during a “time of unbelievable success.” He pointed to the company’s “greatest Q2 ever” and “greatest year of growth ever” as evidence this is the right moment to make the transition.
In that vein, he said T-Mobile just experienced its “biggest iPhone weekend” ever, with sales and customer switching from the new iPhone launch both up double digits from last year.
In the CNBC interview, Gopalan showed some rhetorical flair of his own, describing his vision for “truly unleashing the Un-carrier.”
For years, he said, T-Mobile’s disruptive strategy was constrained because it hadn’t “always had the best network.” Now, he argued, the company can combine network leadership with “digital skills that are way superior to anyone else.”
Asked to define those digital skills, Gopalan pointed to AI and automation that simplifies a variety of processes, citing new tools to make switching carriers much easier. The ultimate goal, he said, is to “bring the best of tech to make life incredibly easy for customers.”
