T-Mobile announced today that CEO Mike Sievert is stepping down effective Nov. 1, to be replaced by current Chief Operating Officer Srini Gopalan. Sievert will continue with the company in the new role of Vice Chairman and also serve on the company’s board of directors.
The announcement comes as T-Mobile is soaring in the mobile marketplace. A CEO shift often indicates problems for a company, but in this case all outward signs point to an orderly, planned succession. It should have little impact on T-Mobile customers, but time will tell; Gopalan faces a softening economy as well as government pressures on how T-Mobile and other carriers do business.
In an email sent to T-Mobile employees and obtained by CNET, Sievert addresses one of the top questions that’s come up after his five-year tenure.
“So why now?” Sievert wrote. “When you take on the role of CEO, you aspire to eventually step away at a time when the results of your tenure – including current and recent performance – are extraordinary.”
The company was recently named by Ookla as the Best Mobile Network in the US, and reported record growth and earnings in its second quarter 2025 financial results, with over 130 million customers. On the business side, T-Mobile also recently announced that it will be the official telecommunications services provider for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
(Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
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Gopalan was brought on as T-Mobile COO in March 2025 after serving as CEO of Deutsche Telekom’s Germany business. He had also been a member of the T-Mobile board for five years at that point. In his email, Sievert referred to Gopalan as “one of my closest advisers and confidants on the board,” sharing responsibility for the company’s successes.
According to sources at T-Mobile, Sievert had Gopalan’s succession in mind when he recruited him for the COO job, a role in which he’s been active for just six months.
“I knew then, after working with Srini for many years, that he’d be the right person to lead T-Mobile into the future,” Sievert wrote. “This transition comes at a moment of extraordinary success and momentum for our company. And like I have told you many times before, the best time to change things up, to prepare a company like ours for the next wave of growth and success, is while you are successful. That’s something that a lot of organizations get wrong.”
Sievert took over the CEO job in 2020 from John Legere, who had held the position for eight years.
In an email to CNET, Jason Leigh, senior research manager of 5G and mobility research at IDC, put the timing into perspective. “[T]here are plenty of stories about CEOs who get long-in-the-tooth or athletes who stay too long past their prime. Executing on a succession plan when things are going well and the leadership change doesn’t represent a stark shift in strategic priorities is a solid way to keep the train on the tracks,” he wrote. “Sievert is giving Gopalan a nicely wrapped housewarming present rather than a chaotic problem that needs to be fixed.”
Sievert’s shift isn’t the first recent management shake-up at T-Mobile. Ulf Ewaldsson, president of technology, and Callie Field, president of the business group, will have both left the company by the end of September.
“All those positives aside, it is worth keeping an eye on the outflow of talent,” said Leigh. “While [Ewaldsson and Field] were replaced by tenured leaders in John Saw and Andre Almeida, it still represents a loss of institutional knowledge. That’s a lot of leadership to ‘lose’ in a short period of time.”