New York — Ted Turner, the brash, outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned large parts of the American West and transformed the news industry by launching CNN in 1980, has died at the age of 87.
Turner died on Wednesday, the network reported, citing a press release from Turner Enterprises.
Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, championed the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a staggering $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women – most famously actress Jane Fonda – and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If I had a little humility, I would be perfect.”
It slowed in later years due to Lewy body dementia. Long out of television work, he has focused on philanthropy and his more than 2 million-acre estate, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His talkative personality sometimes overshadowed his impulsive and risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. In a massive 1996 media deal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and two successful movie studios.
Turner’s signature achievement was the creation of CNN, the first 24-hour all-news television network, in 1980. At a time when news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to remember that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to find out what’s happening in the world was once so revolutionary.
In part, Turner’s frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked after 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts had already stopped, and he was in bed by the time his local stations were doing their 11 p.m. newscasts.
He jumped at the opportunity by starting the operation sometimes called the “Chicken Spaghetti Network” in the early days of cable television, while he lived in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I had to hit hard and move incredibly fast, and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have time to react, because they should have done it, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Achievement Academy. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most of the television journalists had fled Baghdad, warning of an imminent American attack. CNN was left capturing striking images of the outbreak of war, with anti-aircraft tracers visible in the sky and reporters fearful of the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued role at CNN after selling his company to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
He later said: “I made a mistake.” “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
The same year – 1996 – saw the birth of Fox News and the arrival of a new dominant mogul in the news world, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion has become the stock of the trade on networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Although CNN has built a particularly strong global news organization online, it struggles to this day with a declining appetite for more live television newscasts.
Robert Edward Turner III was born on November 19, 1938 in Cincinnati. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive at his father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s suicide in 1963, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On December 17, 1976, the station began broadcasting to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became TBS SuperStation. “It was the beginning of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.
TBS’ diverse lineup of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns has been boosted by Turner’s acquisition of the Atlanta Braves baseball team. A perennial mop, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the country with their super-hit exposure, and in the 1980s they began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”
Turner, who put on a uniform early and managed one game, helped open up baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.
In the 1980s, Turner went into debt to buy MGM, a move that was again met with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of old films that were eventually monetized by the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to old films earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He has also been criticized for adding color to classic films like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them attractive to younger audiences.
TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, launching Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We’re all looking at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it’s obvious to everyone.”
He revealed his ambitions when he was young: “I used to tell people that I wanted to be the greatest sailor, businessman and lover in the world at the same time.”
When asked to share the secret of his success, he said: “Go to bed early, wake up early, work like hell and advertise.”
For most of his life, the slender, athletic man with a mustache attracted beautiful women with a scandalous charm, and was married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She stopped acting while married to Turner, but grew tired of his flirtations and divorced him, although they remained friends.
“It was exciting. It was great. He had two million acres by the time I left. It was easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an unlikely friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, where they bonded over hunting and policy disagreements over rum and cigars. Once a bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern for the environment.
Turner built a sports empire, at one time owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He is best remembered when he was at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, where he turned doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres of ranches, complete with roaming buffalo, and was the largest private landowner in Nebraska. He has spoken frequently about reviving bison herds in the West, and in 2002 he started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&U of M credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping to increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of Southern Plains bulls.
His net worth reached $2.5 billion in 2023, but he fell below Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
During the stock market crash, Turner’s net worth rose from about $10 billion to about $2 billion in two and a half years.
“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in thirty months,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography Call Me Ted. This means that my net worth declined on average by about $67 million “per week,” or roughly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”
He had enough time and money to devote to lofty goals such as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.
“You see, my life is more of an adventure than a money-making pursuit. Adventure is going out and doing something for the hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There is no thought of gain other than your own personal satisfaction.”
Over the years, Turner’s antics sometimes overshadowed his business activities.
After he captained his boat, “Intrepid,” to the 1977 America’s Cup title, television cameras sprawled on the floor at a victory celebration captured a very drunk Turner.
Turner managed to offend many with his lip-synching style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he described Christians as “losers” and “Christ-obsessed”, later apologizing for both statements.
He once suggested in a speech that unemployed blacks be used to pull rope-borne rockets “like Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.
Other times, his sense of humor saved him from potentially embarrassing situations, as when he spoke to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You Germans have had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You’ve been on the wrong side of two wars. You’ve been the loser. I know what it’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win either. You guys can turn things around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves can do it, Germany can do it.”
Turner, a father of five children, assumed a leadership role in American philanthropy when on September 18, 1997, he pledged to give $1 billion, or $100 million annually for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued to give money to the United Nations, calling it the best hope for peace.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined forces with former US Senator Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner has publicly expressed concern about the world’s problems.
“If I had to predict the way things are going, I would say the odds of humanity being extinct in 50 years are about 50 to 50,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming scares the living daylights out of me.”
While he poured millions into nonprofit organizations on a global scale, Turner was also fond of distributing his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a fire on one of his farms. Another time he loaned portraits to an exhibition at the Bozeman, Montana, museum.
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Former Associated Press reporter Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.