WeWork may be swapping out one flamboyant, long-haired CEO for another.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere is in talks to become the next CEO of WeWork, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, with The New York Times also reporting the same.
Legere would be taking over after eccentric former CEO Adam Neumann was pushed out of the troubled shared workspace company in September, and the Journal notes that like Neumann, Legere is an "unconventional executive," and he's known for his "pugnacious style, trashing his rivals on Twitter as 'Dumb and Dumber,' using foul language and dressing in the company's signature magenta."
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A previous profile of Legere in the Journal also described him as "the world’s most relentless corporate pugilist," pointing to everything from the time he tweeted out a list of suggested Verizon slogans that included "screws over customers" to the time he compared AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson to Batman villain the Riddler. "They are kind of interchangeable and both my nemesis," he tweeted.
Neumann was also known for his own unconventional leadership at WeWork, with a Journal article in September revealing an array of odd details about the former chief executive, including that he once expressed interest in becoming "president of the world," that his wife has ordered multiple employees fired minutes after meeting them because she "didn't like their energy," and that he "stunned" employees by having Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels burst in to perform "It's Tricky" after 7 percent of the staff had been fired.
WeWork recently received $5 billion in new financing in a deal with SoftBank, and CNBC reported that when this deal was announced, the company had been about one week away from running out of money. Since taking over T-Mobile in 2012, The Verge notes that Legere took the company from a "distant fourth place" U.S. carrier to a "strong third-place competitor," and so he "seems to be WeWork's idea of a fixer."
