After serving as head of the company for 17 years, AT&T’s CEO Ed Whitacre plans to step down June 4. Whitacre was the architect of the massive consolidation trend characteristic of what had, first, been Southwestern Bell, then SBC, then AT&T.
The post-Ma Bell divestiture Southwestern Bell went on a tear of telephone company purchases, buying PacTel, Southern New England Telephone (SNET), Ameritech, interexchange carrier AT&T and finally BellSouth to create the largest phone company and broadband provider in the world. Whitacre started as an engineer in Lubbock, TX under the old Ma Bell system and rose to President and COO in 1988, ascending to the Chairman and CEO slot in 1990.
Despite his roots in the old bureaucratic AT&T, Whitacre was one of the most competitive and aggressive of the new telco executives, with his efforts culminating in the reassembly of phone companies into a new behemoth that looks a lot like the company he first joined. He’s also been an outspoken advocate regarding the rights of the telcos to do whatever they want with their broadband networks (see “They’re my pipes”), sparking the movement for net neutrality regulations.
COO Randall Stephenson succeed Whitacre as chairman and CEO.
Update: Completely forgot to mention the most newsworthy part of the whole Whitacre retirement deal — the guy is going to get a retirement package worth $158.5 million. The second highest such deal for a public company CEO. Granted, he did work for the company for 43 years and was responsible for a string of sucesses. But, still, $158.5 million?
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:44 PM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
