>But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition.

That is because SoftBank didn't know what to do with Sprint and refused to invest money into the business. When SoftBank bought Sprint, the company was profitable and T-Mobile was unprofitable. Deutsche Telekom had been trying to offload T-Mobile for years but wanted more than it was worth. Slowly the tables turned and T-Mobile became profitable while Sprint started losing money.

Masayoshi Son is the Eddie Lampert of Japan. Son used to be worth about $100 billion, but his bad investments via SoftBank over the last twenty years cut $80 billion off his wealth.