Carrier stays in US

[GUBU]

What are the odds of said investment being actually close to even 10% of what's being trumpeted?

It depends on how it's being invested.  If it's being sunk into infrastructure, they could wind up close to --or over-- that total.  Without any details, it's just a big number.

I'm more interested in how they plan to add 50,000 new jobs.  If this offer is being made on the assumption that the Trump administration will allow the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, how would they add that many jobs?  Don't most mergers --especially ones of this size-- reduce the workforce to eliminate redundancy?  Presumably, 50,000 new jobs in a large telecom company are not going to be minimum wage burger flippers or janitors.  If they can actually deliver that many jobs I wouldn't care how much of that $50 billion actually gets invested.  But right now that's also just a big number.

I'm guessing what they're doing is include all sorts of temporary positions which'll be there for three months or so around the merger and the jobs "created" by companies building any infrastructure (there won't be any new jobs it'll just mean that instead of getting their brickies on job X they'll be on job Y) and all sorts of other shennanigans to inflate job creation numbers to make what probably will be (at the very best) a gross increase of a couple of thousand jobs into the 50,000 reported. And then of course you've got to factor in the losses due to merger (lots of call centre, back office, accountancy, clerical, engineering and other staff will be culled) you could have a situation where the losses far outstrip the gains. Sprint look to have c. 30,000 employees in the US, and T-Mobile 50,000. We could see upwards of a quarter of those jobs merged out of existence.