Chiefs of T-Mobile and Sprint Spar on Twitter

In speeches and on social media, John Legere, the chief executive of T-Mobile, has built a reputation of emphatically, if sometimes profanely, promoting T-Mobile’s services, often at the expense of the competition.

That penchant has appeared to rub off on the chief executive of another wireless carrier. Late Wednesday night on Twitter, after Mr. Legere criticized a new pricing plan from Sprint called “All In,” Marcelo Claure, Sprint’s chief executive, responded in kind with a string of tweets calling T-Mobile’s own pricing practices misleading.


In the past, Mr. Legere usually focuses his venom on the two largest carriers in the United States, AT&T and Verizon. And this spring, T-Mobile and Sprint together petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to expand the pool of airwaves to be sold next year to smaller carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile, but not AT&T and Verizon, which each have significantly more market share in the United States than other carriers.

But on Wednesday night, in an expletive-laden message, Mr. Claure said T-Mobile was “worse than the other two carriers together.”

Mr. Legere responded 13 hours later.