Sprint, T-Mobile CEOs’ Twitter exchange takes comical turn

An ongoing Twitter twist between the rival CEOs of Sprint and T-Mobile reached a comical turn this week. A wild, tornadic, slobbering turn.

Marcelo Claure, six months into his job as head of Sprint Corp., turned to the Warner Brothers cartoon character Tazmanian Devil to describe the behavior of John Legere, head of T-Mobile US Inc.

It was Claure’s attempt to stop the social media spin that they’ve gotten into of late.

Legere, a prolific poster on Twitter, is known for taking jabs at his rivals. And Claure has responded in kind.

Their thrust and parry was picked up by tech writer Roger Cheng, sparking this exchange.

Claure’s Twitter feed is filled with others’ tweets that he has sent out to his own following, admittedly a meager 56,000 or so compared with Legere’s recently attained audience of more than 1 million Twitter followers.

Retweeting messages posted by others is a quick way to populate a Twitter stream. Legere essentially questioned whether Sprint employees were using retweets to populate Claure’s Twitter account for him.

Claure’s answer was that he runs his own account.

Sprint’s CEO has not been shy about sending out meaningful tweets. This week, for example, he replied to one question sent his way that it would be worth watching what Sprint does with its logo or signature yellow logo color.

Tellingly, that tweet had been posted at 12:49 a.m. Sunday, well before the crack of dawn.

Claure struck most recently after network tester RootMetrics ranked Sprint’s network ahead of T-Mobile’s for overall performance.

Legere had his own thoughts about the RootMetrics report’s findings.

We’ll keep watch to see whether the spinning continues.

This story was originally published February 12, 2015 at 3:06 PM with the headline "Sprint, T-Mobile CEOs’ Twitter exchange takes comical turn."