TED TURNER

Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati in 1938 and raised in Savannah, Georgia. His father Ed ran a billboard advertising company and was, by most accounts, a brutal disciplinarian who beat his son regularly.

Ted was expelled from Brown University for having a woman in his dorm room. His father handed him a struggling billboard business in the early 1960s.

Ed Turner then killed himself in 1963, leaving Ted to run Turner Advertising at age 24. He turned that billboard company into a media empire.

He bought a struggling UHF station in Atlanta in 1970 — Channel 17, WTCG — and turned it into a "superstation" by beaming it via satellite to cable systems nationwide. It became WTBS.

In 1980, he launched CNN, the first 24-hour television news network. Nobody thought it would work.

They called it the "Chicken Noodle Network." It changed how the entire world consumed news. He bought MGM/UA in 1986 for $1.5 billion, mostly for the film library (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca).

He won the America's Cup sailing race in 1977. He owned the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks.

In 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner in a $7.5 billion deal. When AOL merged with Time Warner in 2000, Turner lost most of his fortune and his influence.

He went from $10 billion to $2 billion.

Turner Broadcasting System was the crown jewel — TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network, and the massive MGM film library. CNN alone was revolutionary.

He also owned the Atlanta Braves (bought 1976, sold when Time Warner took over), the Atlanta Hawks, and World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Turner Enterprises manages his ranch land — roughly 2 million acres across multiple states, making him the second-largest private landowner in America.

He also co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative and started the Goodwill Games as a Cold War sports diplomacy effort.

Turner was never a traditional investor. He was a dealmaker and empire builder.

His style was to find undervalued or overlooked media assets — a weak UHF station, a struggling baseball team, an entire film library — and bet that he could make them worth more through sheer force of personality and creative distribution. He used debt aggressively, often leveraging everything he owned to make the next acquisition.

He trusted his gut over spreadsheets. He moved fast, talked faster, and figured out the details later.

His approach to business was essentially: find something nobody else wants, buy it cheap, and make it famous.

CNN. He spent $30 million launching a 24-hour news network that every media executive in America said would fail.

Within a decade, CNN was the most influential news source on the planet. The Gulf War in 1991 — when CNN was the only network broadcasting live from Baghdad — cemented it as the default global news channel.

The original $30 million investment became worth billions. Also, buying the MGM film library for effectively $500 million (after selling back everything else) gave him content that powered TBS and TNT for decades.

The AOL-Time Warner merger in 2000. Turner supported the deal and ended up as the biggest individual loser.

His Time Warner stock was worth about $10 billion before the merger. Within two years, the combined company lost $100 billion in market value.

Turner's stake dropped to roughly $2 billion. He lost his operational role, lost his board influence, and watched helplessly as the company he built got absorbed into a dysfunctional conglomerate.

He called it "the biggest mistake of my career" and has said publicly that the merger was "like getting married and then finding out your wife is a man."

Turner believed in thinking big and acting fast. "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" was his motto.

He thought most businesspeople were too cautious, too slow, and too afraid of looking stupid. He believed you should bet on yourself, even when — especially when — the smart money thinks you're wrong.

He also believed deeply in giving money away while you're alive. His $1 billion UN pledge in 1997 was accompanied by a public challenge to other billionaires to stop hoarding wealth.

He did this a full 13 years before the Giving Pledge existed.

Turner has been married three times. His second wife was Jane Fonda — they married in 1991 and divorced in 2001.

He has five children from his first two marriages. He has spoken publicly about his bipolar disorder and his difficult relationship with his father.

His father's suicide in 1963 profoundly shaped his urgency to achieve things quickly — he often said he felt he was running out of time, even in his 30s. In later years, he became increasingly focused on environmental causes, nuclear disarmament, and conservation.

He was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, which he disclosed publicly in 2018.

Turner attended Brown University but was expelled before graduating. He had originally enrolled to study classics, then switched to economics.

His father was furious about the classics major and wrote him a scathing letter that Ted later had published. Being expelled didn't slow him down — he went straight into the family billboard business and never looked back.

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