T-Mobile announced today that CEO Mike Sievert will step down effective Nov. 1 and be replaced by current Chief Operating Officer Srini Gopalan. Sievert will continue with the company as vice chairman and also serve on its 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 and government pressures on how T-Mobile and other carriers do business.

In an email sent to T-Mobile employees and obtained by CNET, Sievert addressed one of the top questions that has 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’s COO in March 2025 after serving as CEO of Deutsche Telekom’s Germany business. At that point, he had also been a member of the T-Mobile board for five years. In his email, Sievert referred to Gopalan as one of his 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, adding that making this type of transition in the middle of a successful period puts the company in a better position. “That’s something that a lot of organizations get wrong.”

Sievert took over the CEO position from John Legere in 2020, who had held it 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, noting that some CEOs get long in the tooth or stay past their prime. “Sievert is giving Gopalan a nicely wrapped housewarming present rather than a chaotic problem that needs to be fixed,” Leigh wrote. 

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.

Leigh noted that while Ewaldsson and Field were replaced by tenured leaders (John Saw and Andre Almeida), it still amounts to a loss of institutional knowledge. “All those positives aside, it is worth keeping an eye on the outflow of talent,” Leigh wrote. “That’s a lot of leadership to ‘lose’ in a short period of time.”