AT&T “leadership” needs to wake up and start making hard decisions about where capital is actually creating value and stop wasting it on nonsense.
Starlink and SpaceX are no longer just interesting companies to watch and laugh about. They represent a serious long term existential threat to traditional telecom like AT&T, and Wall Street is clearly paying attention. The recent 30% decline in AT&T’s stock price reflects the growing concerns about the company’s future and its ability to compete in a changing industry.
AT&T employs roughly 100,000 people, and maintaining a large and widespread office footprint comes with enormous ongoing costs like office leases, utilities, HVAC, water, janitorial services, security, parking, maintenance, supplies, and countless other facilities expenses in the neighborhood of $2B-$4B annually.
A reduction in unnecessary office space and a more flexible virtual first approach could free up tens of billions of dollars used for real competitive investment. That’s capital could be redirected toward the things that will actually determine whether AT&T wins the next decade like network investment, technology, spectrum, AI, innovation, and attracting and retaining top talent.
Instead, we’re continuing to wastefully spend billions on office space each year while also building a new multi billion dollar HQ nobody (besides Stink) wants or needs. At a time when the company is facing its biggest competitive threat in history, is that really the best use of capital?
AT&T doesn’t need to waste more billions proving employees can sit in a building like it’s 1960 in 2026. It needs to spend its available billions proving it can compete in the future, and right now morale is so low because of RTO that nobody here is motivated or cares at all.
If leadership is serious about competing against starlink, then capital should follow strategy. Go after the easy low hanging fruit and reduce the unnecessary facilities and associated costs, rethink archaic RTO requirements, and invest those dollars where they’ll actually generate a real competitive return. Ending the RTO nonsense seems like one of the easiest and most obvious places to start.
Too bad this “leadership” team is full of proven losers who can’t admit they got it wrong, again. One man’s ego and stubbornness will be the demise of a once great American company. Sad!