T-Mobile's New CEO Makes His First Big Leadership Bet

Eight months into the top job, Srini Gopalan has put his first real stamp on who runs T-Mobile, and he has not done it by halves.

In one announcement the carrier is hiring wireless veteran Chris Sambar as Chief Enterprise Officer, expanding the remits of two more senior executives and parting with Mike Katz, a 28-year insider who helped turn a regional also-ran into a national force.

Four of T-Mobile's most senior portfolios move at once, one of the broadest shake-ups of its leadership team in years. "Chris is a seasoned wireless industry leader with proven experience including expanding high-growth businesses and seizing market opportunities," says Srini, T-Mobile's CEO, announcing the appointment. "He's a terrific addition to T-Mobile's leadership team."

A new CEO reshapes the top table

Srini succeeded Mike Sievert on 1 November 2025, with Sievert stepping up to Vice Chairman, which makes this the first real signal of how the new chief wants his team built. The answer leans towards outside firepower.

Chris arrives from Public Storage, where he is Chief Operating Officer, after two decades at AT&T that included building its 5G network and steering the FirstNet public-safety project.

He reports to Srini and takes charge of T-Mobile's SMB, enterprise and government businesses.

The new Chief Enterprise Officer role gathers those segments under one leader, and rather than promote from within, Srini hired from outside, a build-versus-buy choice settled firmly in favour of buy.

AT&T and Verizon have long held the edge there, so bringing in a network chief of that pedigree signals both where T-Mobile sees its next revenue and how hard it means to chase it.

28 years, then a LinkedIn goodbye

Katz's exit is the human counterweight to that hire. He started out selling VoiceStream phones at Circuit City in the late 1990s and climbed to Chief Business and Product Officer, a path that ran through marketing, enterprise and the T-Mobile for Business unit. He leaves to pursue new interests and stays on as a strategic advisor through December.

"We built a regional player into a national powerhouse, flipped the industry on its head with the Un-carrier movement, pulled off the Sprint merger, and pushed into broadband and enterprise," Katz writes in a LinkedIn post looking back on his tenure.

For HR, a departure like his is the delicate side of any reshuffle: keeping nearly three decades of institutional memory close, through the advisory role, while clearing space for a new direction and new faces at the top. 

Building for AI and 6G

The rest of the moves show where Srini wants the company pointed.

André Almeida takes an expanded brief as Chief Marketing, Brand and Broadband Officer, working alongside Chief Operating Officer Jon Freier across consumer wireless and broadband, while Chief Technology Officer John Saw picks up integrated control of network, technology, product engineering and cybersecurity.

T-Mobile frames the whole realignment as preparation for an era defined by AI and 6G, the next generation of mobile networks.

There is a parent watching, too. T-Mobile is majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom, and Srini, a former Telekom board member, arrived with a mandate to keep the growth engine running. 

Reshuffles are easy to announce and hard to land. Srini has bet the top of his org chart on enterprise, broadband and a 6G standard that will not go commercial until the next decade, and he has done it by dropping a marquee outsider into one of the industry's most tight-knit cultures.

Get that right and the reshuffle looks like renewal; get it wrong and it reads as a new boss trading hard-won continuity for star names.