Elliott Management Builds Deutsche Telekom Stake, Pushes Company to Kill T-Mobile Megamerger

Paul Singer's Elliott Investment Management has built a stake in Deutsche Telekom and wants the German telecom giant to drop any talk of merging with its majority-owned U.S. subsidiary, T-Mobile US, according to a Bloomberg report cited by Reuters and multiple outlets on Wednesday, September 2.

Elliott instead wants Deutsche Telekom to unlock shareholder value through other means, including bigger share buybacks, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The exact size of Elliott's stake was not disclosed.

T-Mobile declined to comment when Reuters asked. Elliott and Deutsche Telekom did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Shares of T-Mobile US closed about 3% higher on Wednesday following the report. The stock is still down 8% year-to-date, according to TradingView.

A $300 Billion Idea That Was Already Fading

The combination idea first surfaced in April, when Bloomberg reported Deutsche Telekom was weighing a new holding company structure that would make a stock bid for both itself and T-Mobile US. The combined entity would have ranked as the world's largest wireless operator by market value, surpassing China Mobile, according to Reuters.

Deutsche Telekom owns a majority of T-Mobile US, a stake disclosed at 54.3% as of mid-July. That subsidiary is Deutsche Telekom's biggest earnings driver, per Reuters.

But the numbers tell an odd story for a parent-swallows-child merger: Deutsche Telekom's market capitalization stands at $157 billion, according to Reuters, while T-Mobile US is valued at $200 billion. T-Mobile also posted stronger percentage growth in service revenue, EBITDA and free cash flow than its parent in 2025, according to Stocktwits and TradingView.

That growth gap is exactly why the deal ran into trouble. By late July, Semafor reported that T-Mobile's own U.S. executives told Deutsche Telekom they no longer supported the roughly $300 billion combination. Executives had grown doubtful that non-controlling shareholders would approve it, and they had been told U.S. regulators would likely require T-Mobile's domestic revenue to stay in the United States, Semafor reported. Investors reportedly treated that news as relief rather than a setback, per TradingView's summary of market reaction.

Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges told investors in February that the company was assessing ways to increase its stake in T-Mobile US, according to Reuters, well before the merger idea went public.

What Elliott Is Actually Asking For

Elliott's position, as reported by Bloomberg, is straightforward: skip the merger, hand cash back to shareholders through buybacks instead. That is a standard activist playbook—force a company to return capital rather than gamble on a complex cross-border combination that its own U.S. management already soured on.

The case for the original merger wasn't nothing, though. Combining the two would have created the largest wireless operator in the world by market value, ahead of state-backed China Mobile, and supporters argued that kind of scale mattered strategically. Deutsche Telekom's ties to T-Mobile stretch back roughly 25 years, and the German group has tightened its grip on the U.S. business since 2020, per Reuters, suggesting real appetite existed at some point for going further, not less.

But with T-Mobile's own leadership already walking away in July, and now a major activist investor publicly opposed on the Deutsche Telekom side, the deal looks dead for practical purposes even without a formal announcement killing it.

A Different Megamerger, A Different Kind of Roadblock

While the T-Mobile situation shows a deal stalling from investor and management resistance, a separate megamerger fight is playing out in a courtroom rather than a boardroom. An opinion piece published by the Daily Wire argues that California's attorney general and eleven other state attorneys general are needlessly delaying the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, with a trial not scheduled until March 2027. The piece, written from the perspective of a party challenging California in court, claims Paramount is contractually obligated to pay Warner Bros. roughly $7 million a day starting in October for as long as the deal remains unresolved, and asserts that federal antitrust enforcers and 68 global regulators have already cleared the transaction. Those figures come from an advocacy piece tied to the litigation, not an independent court filing, and California's attorneys general have not offered their counter-argument in these sources. The state's actual legal rationale for the suit remains unstated here.

Both stories underline the same basic fact heading into the fall of 2026: massive corporate combinations are running into resistance from multiple directions—activist shareholders in telecom, state regulators in media—and neither the T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom situation nor the Paramount/Warner Bros. case has a resolution date that's actually arrived yet.

The open question for T-Mobile investors is whether Deutsche Telekom's board will publicly confirm it's dropping the merger idea, or let it die quietly the way T-Mobile's own executives already have. Neither company has said so on the record as of Wednesday.