Thread regarding Crown Castle International Corp. layoffs

OMG I forgot about the millions on millions on millions they wasted with the "HR strategy team" who never had a strategy for anything except buzz words and bullying, more evidence our HR department never was or has been HR they were and are legal liabilities and that's about it. Didn't they move their head of strategy who failed there with no other experience to be the head of IT and then the same cr-p there but worse? I heard she just kept calling consultant friends and paid them to tell her what to do when they didn't know either. HA!

If one more new leader hired by the new executives walks in with the “why are you doing it this way?” face making lists of people to let go, please know: WE KNOW. We’ve known. We survived consultant armies, meetings that should’ve been emails, pet projects we knew were stupid, tech leaders who thought we were Google (we’re not), HR turning everything into a strategy session, and leaders who wouldn’t listen while the rest of us worked extra hours to keep the place running around them. We’ve seen the waste by the past leaders and couldn’t stop them but you are making us pay for it, how much are you making again?

Every new regime promised change, so like id--ts with hope, we stayed. Now the latest crew walks in, sees a mess and immediately reaches for the chainsaw. Maybe try asking the people holding the damn broom first. You’re new to the mess. We’ve been cleaning it up for years. Learn the layout before you gut the house and replace everyone with your friends paying them a lot more than us, we aren’t that big anymore so it’s not hard to find out.

@10r stop pretending Crown is financially collapsing. Look at the actual comparison: CCI is down about 15% YTD and 19% over the last year versus roughly 7% and 9% for SBA—even though SBA’s U.S. tower performance isn’t materially better. Over three years the stocks are almost even. That screams recent confidence problem, not suddenly broken tower economics. Crown’s problem is leadership credibility after years of strategy whiplash and executive churn. Stop turning real, fixable issues into a fake financial death spiral and feeding the exact negative narrative hurting us. STOP IT!

@10d the fact if the matter is crowns liabilities out way its assets thats a fact and their divendend ratio is 174% of earnings which is also a fact. It is total spin from executive leadership that the balance sheet has stabilized. You can use adjust funds from operations all you want and claim reits are differnt but reality is they are handcuffed crown is spending more on a divendend than they earn. The money has to come from somewhere. More debt ? More RIFs ?

@ze No one is spinning anything. We’re asking people to use the facts ALL OF THEM.

Yes, Crown has debt and financial challenges. Nobody is denying that. But calling an investment-grade credit rating the equivalent of a “580 trash credit score” and judging a REIT dividend only against GAAP net income is not a complete picture, that is actually spinning and negatively spinning the truth into something it's not. There are legitimate things to challenge here: debt, execution, capital allocation, repeated strategy changes and leadership decisions. Those deserve scrutiny. What doesn’t help is turning every data point into “Crown is dying” and feeding another round of panic.

Employees have already lived through years of layoffs, reorganizations and uncertainty. Constant doom-posting affects the same people still trying to keep the company running, manufacturing more crisis mode needs to end and I believe that's the point of this letter to leaders, make it stop.

Accountability matters. Accuracy matters too. Leadership needs to lead, fix what is broken and create stability, and people should stop choosing to make the environment worse with exaggerated narratives.

Facts over fear. Fix it and move forward. It will help people, the bottom line and the stock. Triple win!

@xd you can spin it all you want the balance sheet doesn't lie 24b in liabilities in which 18b is debt with 21b in assets. Total equity loss has increased. Crown bond rating is the lowest investment grade its like a credit score 580 Trash and there spending more on the dividend than they earn

@x2 Your conclusion is materially misleading. There’s fair criticism, but the numbers don’t support this.

Q2 debt wasn’t $24B. Crown had $18.35B face-value debt and $17.1B net debt, down from $24.6B net debt in Q1 after using $7B+ of the fiber proceeds to pay down debt. That’s real deleveraging.

BBB/Baa3 is investment grade, not “essentially junk.” Crown’s weighted-average rate is 3.7%, and yes, refinancing will cost more—that’s a legitimate concern.

The buyback isn’t “saving” Crown either: $7B+ went to debt reduction vs. $1B to buybacks, reducing expected annual interest expense by ~$160M. And Crown already cut its dividend from $6.26 to $4.25 annually.

Criticize the leverage and stock performance all you want, a lot of that is due to leadership turnover and the drip from 76 to 72 seems to be directly tied to that, why we need that to stop not just for mental sanity but stock health and confidence for the markets. The $24B debt + basically junk + buybacks keeping it alive simply isn’t what the Q2 numbers show at all.

@va as of q2 2026 crown has 18-24 billion in debt and 21 billion in assets. The balance sheet is trash even after the fiber sale. It has BBB & Baa3 bond rating its esstionaly junk. The weighted average of current debt id 3.7% any new money if they can borrow it will cost them north of 5%.The stock has been on death spiral for years. The only thing that saving them is the buy back. All the free cash is going to dividend dont fool yourself

BOARD + EMT: THIS IS THE CALL TO ACTION.

Read this thread. The fear, rumors, anger and employees turning on each other are what years of layoff → new leader → reorg → new strategy → new leader → layoff → new leader → new strategy → new leader → new strategy → layoff have created.

Enough!!!!!!!!!!!

You wanted a leaner Crown. You have one. Now make it a healthy one.

Take care of the people left. Fix workloads. Train and develop them. Rebuild trust. Listen when they identify problems. Give them stability and room to actually thrive again.

Financial discipline matters. But you cannot cut your way to a great company forever.

Break the cycle. Stabilize. Rebuild. Execute. Grow. Take care of your people.

@sm “Debt spiral” is pure drama, not fact-based. The actual numbers don’t support it.

At 6/30/26, Crown had $17.1B of net debt after paying down billions following the fiber sale. It had $4.5B of undrawn revolver capacity, $2B of commercial-paper capacity, and reported 6.1x leverage against a 7.0x covenant limit.

And here’s the part that really ki-ls the “spiral” argument: Q2 interest expense on debt actually FELL from $239M to $202M year over year, and Crown lowered its 2026 interest-expense outlook after the fiber transaction.

Then compare peers. SBA also operates with substantial leverage in the 6x range. American Tower generally runs lower leverage, while Crown and SBA run higher. So “the other tower companies are healthy while Crown is in a debt spiral” simply isn’t a true description of the peer comparison.

Yes, higher rates are a headwind. Nobody disputes that. But paying down billions of debt + billions of available liquidity + falling interest expense ≠ (does not equal) debt spiral.

And saying Crown “can’t borrow to build” while it has a completely undrawn $4.5B revolver is especially hard to defend.

Stop presenting exaggeration as financial fact the false narratives and negative propaganda causes stress for real people enough. The filings are public. Compare the numbers.

@q6 have you looked at your debt to equity or divided to debt. The other tower companies are healthy. Crown is in a debt spiral. With rates this high they can’t borrow as much now to do their build and it compress its margin. Once you have to cut your dividend you will become worth even less. Also if someone can get the same return on a 10 yr why put money into crown?

@g2 sorry but the balance sheet an the cash flow statement are a mess you can spin it all you want, but if I was a wall street money manger I wouldn't touch Crown with a 10 foot pole. Decinling revenue, huge debt load and all the free cash paying a dividend slightly higher than a 10 year treasury.

Doubtful leaders will read this letter but hope they do. For those who didn’t read the numbers, even analysts disagree. Last week JPMorgan downgraded Crown and cut its target $85 to $80. The stock took the hit. Now Morgan Stanley says $85. Crown has challenges and needs discipline after years of spending like spoiled kids who never heard “no.” But needing discipline isn’t a dumpster fire, allowing the leaders to treat people like cr-p is and that’s what needs immediate change and business support is a joke. Do better, stop feeding the panic. Read the financials, not the headlines

@pn so another troll who can’t read and clearly doesn’t work for crown? “Last place” in what metric? Crown has 40,000+ towers and ~$2.69B projected EBITDA. SBA projects ~$1.93B. Crown has real problems, but making up a scoreboard and insulting the workforce isn’t analysis. Bring numbers.

Crown isn’t “last” financially. SBA is considerably smaller than Crown in absolute revenue, EBITDA and AFFO. And Crown’s Q2 AFFO increased 10%, compared with -5.2% at SBA and +3.8% at American Tower. If Crown focuses on top-line growth and without CP we will we will also have a shot at the top vs the middle.

Stop the random d-mb statements maybe read and learn, those of us left at crown who do jobs meant for 4 people actually do. My guess is the trolls were kicked out in the first wave?

@mr this guy gets it. You are last place out of all the tower companies and have mostly c to f workforce.

@mr So Crown has been laying people off for six years, yet the people still standing after six years of cuts are the ones with no useful skills That’s a fascinating theory of workforce reduction. Some people stay because they’re good at what they do and expect leadership to be good at what it does, waiting for it or maybe it’s the bonus and RSUs? Wanting the company to improve isn’t “wishful thinking.” Pretending everyone who disagrees with you is unemployable might be. Your leadership material, Sunit is that you?

Layoffs at Crown have been going on for 6 years now. If you are still working here it’s because you don’t have any skills that are useful. It’s not that you don’t want to leave, it’s because you can’t leave. Thinking Crown has an opportunity to return to its glory days is just wishful thinking. Good day!

@mm You’re proving the entire point of this thread. When your answer to understaffing, consolidated roles and overloaded employees is “it’s your fault, quit,” you’re basically giving away the secret: you’re one of the incompetent people everyone is talking about. Thanks for identifying yourself.

If you are struggling with your workload at Crown that is on you and not anybody else. The numbers show there are too many employees and not enough work. Wanting handouts from a company who is consistently cutting jobs and struggling to stay afloat is wild. You can leave anytime you want if you are unhappy. I’d bet you have no real skills or you’d be long gone by now.

@m1 Invest in employees? When you consolidate jobs, hand people multiple roles with little training, pile on projects and have people working 80 hours afraid they’re next maybe give them training, realistic workloads, decent leaders and support. It doesn’t mean paying people to “hang out.” But thanks for the kindergarten-level management lesson while you’re rhe guy II rbe corner who wet his pants and likely one the leaders blaming your team for your failure. “Be quiet, you’re lucky to have a job” isn’t leadership.

Can someone explain to me what “invest in the employees” means like I’m 5? It seems like you just want a bunch of people hanging out, pretending like they are busy while being paid top dollar get promotions the business can’t justify.

@j8 can you please be our next EMT member, logic is well overdue in that group!

Swore I’d never post here. Someone sent me this letter. Damn. Well done.

But apparently we need a quick lesson for anyone who has spent too long inside the Crown bubble:

TOWER ECONOMICS 101: MATURE ≠ DYING

• Wireless has ALWAYS moved in cycles: BUILD → UPGRADE → CONSOLIDATE → RATIONALIZE → CAPACITY FILLS → INVEST AGAIN.

• Yes, we’re basically down to three giant carrier customers. Concentration risk? Yep. Death of towers? Nope.

• T-Mobile bought Sprint. It did not vaporize Sprint customers or their data usage. Traffic moved onto a consolidated network that still has to carry it.

• Americans used 132.5 TRILLION MB of wireless data in 2024. Nearly 14x 2015. Ericsson reported mobile traffic still growing 23% YoY in Q2 2026, with North America contributing to the increase.

More data. Same physics. Networks need capacity.

• And READ OUR OWN NUMBERS instead of the scary headline: 2025 site-rental revenue fell 5.1%, while organic contribution to site-rental billings grew 4.9% excluding Sprint cancellations.

The point: known consolidation churn was masking growth underneath it.

READ. PAST. THE. HEADLINE.

• Next growth probably isn’t another gold rush. It’s amendments. Spectrum. Capacity. Densification. Fixed wireless. Escalators. Then the next network cycle.

• Stop expecting 2020–22 forever and declaring anything less a funeral, doing so shows you have no other experience or financial understanding.

This is mature infrastructure. It comes in waves.

Sorry, naysayers: MATURE. NOT DEAD.

And some of what Crown is doing now actually makes sense.

• Manage debt. We are.

• Control spending. Good. For years, apparently asking “do we actually need this?” wasn’t always “purple”. Having to justify spending now doesn’t mean we’re broke. It means we’re finally behaving like a grown-up company instead of handing out snacks to anyone who asks, literally we did that.

• Cut waste. Absolutely.

• Simplify. Please.

• Stop confusing cost discipline with financial distress.

Where Crown deserves criticism is different: leadership churn, inconsistent execution and what employees absorbed while strategies kept changing yet blamed employees for impossible execution.

We paid dearly for executive turnover. CP and SP are now departing under qualifying-termination arrangements after relatively short tenures which for both makes me and most people sick for how bad at their jobs they are and were. Whatever anyone thinks about their individual performance, that’s another expensive reminder that hiring the wrong senior leader costs far more than salary. It affects customers, employees, decisions, execution, risk and eventually the next leadership transition.

Maybe next time we don’t treat executive recruiting like speed dating and that’s on our board not our employees so next let’s review their resumes and track record.

Now the assignment is boring. Good.

EXECUTE.

Keep customers.

Grow the assets.

Control costs.

Invest intelligently.

Develop people.

And for the love of EBITDA, take care of the employees who actually know how these towers work.

When the next investment wave arrives, don’t return to spoiled-child spending either. Save during good years. Stay disciplined during slower ones. Understand that future waves may be incremental rather than another once-in-a-generation nationwide network buildout.

That’s not devastation.

That’s MATURITY.

The tide went out. The ocean didn’t disappear.

Maybe stop screaming about the missing water and learn how tides work. If not the University of Houston and Penn have great resources on business, finance, accounting and economics, go back to school and proctor a class so we can stop this panic reaction with the downstream stress it causes to people and understand this for what it is.

Can we retire the “sky is falling” narrative? ~$32B company. $4B+ revenue. Billions in EBITDA and AFFO. Yes, debt matters. Yes, carrier spending normalized after years when expansion was raining money. No rational person expected that growth cycle forever.

If Crown is supposedly in such dire financial shape, explain the revolving door of executives receiving multimillion-dollar compensation, equity and packages on the way out. Apparently the crisis is severe enough to repeatedly cut employees but not severe enough to stop incentivizing leadership churn.

Crown has challenges. It is not on life support. Manage the debt. Cut waste. Simplify. Grow. Invest in the people doing the work.

The sky isn’t falling. Stop staring at it and run the damn company in a healthy way, it can be done and we don’t need matching purple sneakers to do it.

@fs That confuses a growth cycle with financial health. When carriers were expanding networks at extraordinary rates, Crown was printing money—but no serious economist would assume that level of capex was sustainable indefinitely. A mature infrastructure company should be judged on contracted cash flows, margins, debt service and capital allocation, not whether its customers remain in perpetual expansion mode. Customer concentration and debt are legitimate risks. A 4.9% revenue decline is not evidence of a dying business. Cycles normalize. That’s economics, not insolvency.

@f8 sorry 4.9% decline in revenues and a mountain of debt is not a mature company. Crown only has 3 customers and all 3 have cut Capex

Crown isn’t failing. It’s matured. BIG difference.

2025: $4.05B site-rental revenue. $2.86B EBITDA. $1.9B AFFO. ~40,000 towers. The challenge is growth, a mature U.S. footprint, carrier consolidation and the cost of past strategic decisions not survival.

Right-size? Yes of corse. Continue to operate like we’re in perpetual crisis? NO. Focus on what matters: profitable growth, operational efficiency, leadership accountability, cost discipline and the people who run the business.

Crisis-management mode needs to end. Fear-based leadership and reactive decisions will drive away more customers and talent, turning the crisis into a self-fulfilling prophecy created by the board and EMT leadership themselves.

$118.28M in SEC-reported compensation through 2025 during the executive-turnover period:

• Jay Brown — $15.21M — 2023–24
• Anthony Melone — $5.66M — 2024
• Steven Moskowitz — $34.66M — $16.44M in 2024 + $18.22M in 2025. His qualifying termination carried $16.07M in disclosed termination-related value.
• Michael Kavanagh — $10.24M — 2023–24
• Edmond Chan — $6.75M — 2024 only; does not include his 2025 compensation through departure or final separation/continued-equity
• Daniel Schlanger — $24.90M — 2023–25
• Sunit Patel — $9.10M — 2025 only; 2026–27 compensation and qualifying-termination benefits still outstanding
• Catherine Piche — $11.76M — 2023–25; 2026–27 compensation and qualifying-termination benefits still outstanding

And it’s still incomplete: Patel/Piche’s 2026–27 compensation and final qualifying-termination benefits for 2026 & 2027 are outstanding. Our current working estimate for Patel/Piche is approximately another $18.5M combined, which would put the working estimate around $136.78M—but their final values have not yet been reported.

And remember: this is only the executives who exited or are exiting. It does not include the compensation of executives who remained, or the VP/Director turnover beneath EMT who received significant compensation.

Before blaming the workforce for being “too big,” look upstairs. Seven departing EMT leaders alone account for roughly ≈ $118.28 MILLION
based on the SEC filing reported compensation & packages for 2023–2025 alone, Moskowitz was $16.067M alone, CEO April 11, 2024 and ceased being CEO March 23, 2025 less than a year! Accountability shouldn’t stop below the executive floor.

And $118.28 Mil isn’t the finished number, SP & CP are still running up our ledger for 2026-2027… which is estimated to add $18.5M during 2026 through separation with one allegedly negotiated staying to secure more contract payouts which should be blocked.

$136.78 million will be the total the exciting executives one the two departing are done were compensated. These aren’t lifetime earnings. They’re the compensation and separation-related values associated with a remarkably short period of executive churn.

@dh who said anything about keeping roles we didn’t need? No one. The company has to structure and stabilize but how we do it matters too and how it’s been done has been gross. Hasn’t been about roles or talent, it’s been about egos and blame.

Lean doesn’t have to mean toxic. Profit and people can and must coexist., We are numbers, it’s ignorant to pretend profitability and a healthy culture can’t coexist. Strong companies have and need both .. smart leaders and people get that.

Crown got bloated. Roles and teams were created without business value, and people were recruited into jobs leadership itself couldn’t justify. But accountability goes up, too. In under three years, 7 EMT members left with millions in compensation exit benefits not counting the revolving door of VPs and Directors packages. Their decisions drove the restructurings, cuts and strategy whiplash; everyone below them carried the burden. We need to right-size staffing where needed. Fill the gaps the cuts created. But stop blaming the people who inherited the mess and start repairing what overly compensated leadership broke before it destroys more people. Enough of the gloom and doom cr-p, $32 bil … ahh yeah we aren’t bankrupt hoarding toilet paper get over it.

You know who invested in the employees? Jay Brown. Up until 2020, the people were very well taken care of, morale was high. Unfortunately, his job was not to just to take care of the people. A series of bad decisions and acquisitions is the only thing that mattered. When the sh-t hit the fan, investors wanted changes that lead to profit immediately. The reality is about half of us shouldn’t have been here. We had whole departments that should be a one person job. The idea that you just keep everyone around when the business is doing poorly is just wishful thinking. This company can be be ran efficiently with 500 people. We are all just numbers and expendable if it leads to higher profits.

$32 BILLION. ~1,200 people.
Companies with 10x the people and a fraction of the value figure out good culture. Crown can too. Stop the cr-p about the dying industry and the good old days, the sky’s not falling and we have a lot of juice left to squeeze ahead of you pull your head out of you a-s and work. The soap opera is over. Stop blaming employees for past leadership decisions. Grow up, move on, take care of the people left and then you see what they can actually do when they aren’t working scared all the time … people seriously have ptsd from the last few years, fix it. If you can’t set the d-mb and d-mber departing with all that cash why can’t you invest in the people who are keeping it all going with less and less? Why is this so hard?

Crown Castle is a bad company in a dying industry. What you fail to realize is they have been fixing it for years with rounds of layoffs. The fix is and always will be to get rid of as many employees as possible. If you think anything other than that then you just don’t want to see the truth.

Period

If leadership still has the urge to “transform” something, there’s one obvious candidate left: HR/BS. And yes, the initials being BS is almost too perfect. Through all of this and before, employees needed HR to protect both the people and the company, neither have been done. New leader, same problems maybe he needs more time and have been too busy with exit packets or violation complaints to manage because stress brought out the worst in many but no one accounted for that. So before another consultant army or shiny transformation transform the BS. Stop making the people doing the work or damaged by the issues the problem, support and take care of them.