Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who ran the company from 2012 to 2020, said at a conference in 2014 that his bright pink T-shirt and sneakers stuck out at Deutsche Telekom board meetings, where everyone else wore suits and the “average age is about 118.” At that point, the US business was widely seen as a strategic problem that German executives had sought to offload. An agreed sale to AT&T Inc. was abandoned in 2011 after intense scrutiny by US regulators.