UPDATE: The tournament is now over. Click here for the results.
The results are in from round two, and they’re pretty interesting.
During our second round of voting, T-Mobile’s John Legere handily surpassed Samsung’s Tim Baxter, and Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf moved past Arris’ Bruce McClelland. And the two executives tied to Sprint—Chairman Masayoshi Son and CEO Marcelo Claure—also moved forward.
Perhaps more interesting though is the momentum behind internet- and video-focused executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Bezos bested Nokia’s top executive and, before that, Google’s Larry Page. And Hastings trounced the CEOs of both AT&T and Zayo.
But it was Ericsson’s Borje Ekholm who received the most votes of any of our candidates during the second round: more than 8,000, thus blasting past Apple’s CEO Tim Cook.
All this potentially sets the stage for some intense competition: In today’s quarterfinals, Ekholm will go up against Sprint’s Claure, who has rallied his hundreds of thousands of social media followers to vote.
Other matchups will pit OneWeb’s Greg Wyler—who won FierceWireless’ rising stars contest earlier this year with a whopping 8,000 votes—against Netflix’s chief executive. And Sprint’s chairman will go up against Amazon’s CEO.
As in previous rounds, we’re using Polldaddy.com for the actual voting, and repeated voting is prohibited with a block to cookies and IP addresses. The third-round bracket is below, and below that are the actual matchups that you can vote on (polls on this round will close around 10 a.m. Eastern time tomorrow, Thursday Dec. 7). Click here for the results from the first round and click here for the results from the second round.
The third round is open, we hope you enjoy it! – Mike | @mikeddano
