Ted Turner, a brash tv pioneer who raced yachts, owned enormous chunks of the American west and remodeled the news enterprise by launching CNN and introducing the 24-hour cable news cycle, died Wednesday. He was 87.
Turner died surrounded by his household, in accordance with Turner Enterprises, the corporate that oversees his huge enterprise pursuits.
Turner owned skilled sports activities groups in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a shocking $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three girls — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He as soon as bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy physique dementia. Long out of the tv enterprise, he focused on philanthropy.
His garrulous persona typically overshadowed a risk-taking enterprise acumen. By the time he offered his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc in 1996, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard firm into a worldwide conglomerate that included seven main cable networks, three skilled sports activities groups and a pair of hit film studios.
President Donald Trump, reacting to Turner’s loss of life, referred to as him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
Turner’s signature achievement was creating the Cable News Network, the primary 24-hour, all-news tv community in 1980. In half, Turner’s personal frustration with tv news was the instigator. He usually labored previous 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air.
He took an opportunity by beginning the operation within the early days of cable tv, dwelling in an house above its Atlanta workplace.
CNN’s breakthrough second got here through the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most tv journalists had fled Baghdad however CNN stayed, capturing arresting photographs of a warfare’s outbreak.
Turner was promised a continued function in CNN after his firm’s sale to Time Warner however was regularly pushed out, a lot to his remorse.
“The mistake I made was shedding management of the corporate,” he later mentioned.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his household moved to Savannah, Georgia, the place he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University, Turner got here to Atlanta to work for his domineering father’s billboard firm, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the corporate. In 1970, he purchased an impartial UHF station with a weak sign that didn’t even cowl Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he started transmitting the station to cable techniques throughout the nation through satellite tv for pc. It turned the TBS SuperStation.
TBS’ motley assortment of outdated films and sitcom reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted followers nationwide by way of their superstation publicity.
In the Nineteen Eighties, Turner went deeply into debt to purchase MGM, a transfer once more greeted with skepticism. But the acquisition gave his firm a library of classic films that ultimately had been parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks.
He revealed his ambitions as a youthful man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
For a lot of his life a partying roustabout who wooed lovely girls, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married thrice. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She uninterested in his philandering and divorced him, though they remained pals.
Perhaps Turner’s biggest love was for the land. He acquired tens of millions of acres in ranches full with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest personal landholder. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of some bulls in 2005 with serving to improve the genetic range of the final herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a web value of $2.5 billion in 2023 however had dropped off Forbes journal’s rating of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money,” Turner as soon as mentioned.
Turner managed to insult many along with his shoot-from-the-lip type. An atheist since his solely sister died of lupus at age 17, he referred to as Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologizing for each remarks.
Turner, the daddy of 5 youngsters, grabbed a management function in American philanthropy along with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to offer $1 billion to United Nations charities.
He promoted a spread of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to begin the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit devoted to decreasing the specter of nuclear, organic and chemical weapons.
As he poured tens of millions into nonprofits on a worldwide scale, Turner was additionally keen on spreading his wealth in small methods. He as soon as gave $500 to a volunteer fireplace division that helped extinguish a blaze on one in all his ranches.
Bauder, a longtime media author, retired from The Associated Press in 2026. Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.
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