Ted Turner

• 1. The Last Broadcast

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  Ted Turner, born Robert Edward Turner III, once ordered a recording of a military marching band playing the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee." He intended it for the final broadcast on Earth.

  Before his news channel ever went on the air, Turner promised that it would not sign off until the world ended. He said it would cover that ending live, as its last event. Turner sometimes played the tape for reporters and explained why he had made it.

  In 2015 the recording turned up in CNN's database and leaked. Its tag read "Hold for release till end of world confirmed."

  The man who made that tape was an American businessman, television producer and philanthropist with a gift for saying exactly what he thought. How did a billboard heir start a channel that never goes dark? Why did he buy a Hollywood studio, a baseball team and wrestling promotions? And what did he do with the fortune and the land he gathered along the way?

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• 2. Billboards and Channel 17

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  At Brown University, Turner chose to study classics, and his father, Robert Edward Turner II, wrote that the choice left him "appalled, even horrified." The father added that he "almost puked." Turner switched to economics but was expelled before earning a degree, after a female student was found in his dormitory room. Brown gave him an honorary B.A. in November 1989, when he came back to deliver the keynote address at the second annual conference of the National Association of College Broadcasters.

  Turner had been born on the 19th of November 1938 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His family moved to Savannah, Georgia, when he was nine. To meet his national service obligation before he could be drafted, he joined the United States Coast Guard Reserve. He later told The Washington Post, "I liked boats." The United States Navy Memorial gave him its Lone Sailor Award in 2013.

  In late 1960 Turner went back to the South as general manager of the Macon, Georgia, branch of his father's billboard business. His father died by suicide in March 1963. At 24, Turner became president and chief executive of Turner Advertising Company. During the Vietnam War era the firm held what one account called virtual monopolies in Savannah, Macon, Columbus and Charleston, and it grew into the largest outdoor advertising company in the Southeast. The business threw off cash while needing almost no new capital.

  In the late 1960s Turner bought several Southern radio stations. In 1969 he sold them to buy a struggling Atlanta television station, UHF channel 17, WJRJ-TV. UHF stations of the day did well mainly in markets with few or no VHF rivals, and even in big cities they were rarely profitable. Turner bet that viewers would eventually want more than a handful of choices. He renamed the station WTCG, for Turner Communications Group, and pitched it with the slogan "Watch This Channel Grow."

  The schedule was thrift itself. As better syndicated shows drifted off the VHF stations, Turner picked them up cheaply. Viewers saw Gilligan's Island, I Love Lucy, Star Trek, Hazel and Bugs Bunny, often second- or third-hand. Humorist Bill Tush read the news at 3 a.m., and Turner joked, "we have a 100% share at this time." Tush once shared the set with a "co-anchor" named Rex, a German Shepherd belonging to an associate. The dog wore a shirt and tie and ate a peanut butter sandwich. Rex appeared on only one episode, yet a myth grew that he was a nightly guest.

  In 1972 the little station won the rights to telecast Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks games.

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• 3. The Superstation

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  Turner also bought the former WCTU in Charlotte, North Carolina, and renamed it WRET-TV after his initials. The station flailed so badly that in 1972 Turner went on air to ask viewers for contributions. By 1975 it was profitable and ranked among the most-watched independent stations in the country. In 1976 every contributor from four years earlier received a check returning the money with interest. In 1978 WRET became Charlotte's NBC affiliate.

  The bigger change came in 1976, when the Federal Communications Commission let WTCG use a satellite to send its signal to cable systems around the nation. On the 17th of December 1976 the rechristened WTCG-TV Super-Station began sending old movies, sitcom reruns, cartoons and sports to cable subscribers everywhere. Many cable operators carried it to fill their schedules, which lifted both viewership and advertising. Subscribers eventually reached 2 million, and Turner's net worth rose to $100 million. He spent $2 million on a 5000 acre plantation in Jacksonboro, South Carolina.

  That same year Turner bought the Atlanta Braves, and in 1977 the Atlanta Hawks, partly to feed the station with programming. Braves games on the superstation reached nearly every home in North America, which made the team a household name well before its winning years. Turner once suggested to pitcher Andy Messersmith, who wore number 17, that he change his surname to "Channel" to promote the station.

  Branding mattered to him too. In 1978 he made a deal with Technology Broadcasting System, a student-operated radio station at MIT now known as WMBR, to obtain the WTBS call sign for $50,000. The letters let him sell his superstation under the initials TBS. His company became Turner Broadcasting System, and WTCG became WTBS.

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• 4. Round-the-Clock News

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  Reese Schonfeld had pitched Turner on a 24-hour news channel in 1977 and been turned away. In 1978 Turner contacted the media executive himself. Schonfeld replied that it could be done with a staff of 300, an all-electronic newsroom and satellites for every transmission. The price tag was an initial investment of $15 million-$20 million, plus several million dollars each month to run it.

  In 1979 Turner sold WRET-TV in Charlotte for $20 million, then a record price for a UHF station, to pay for the venture. He based the new operation in Atlanta, where costs were lower and the workforce was non-union. Schonfeld became first president and chief executive of the Cable News Network, which went on the air on the 1st of June 1980.

  The founding team came largely from established newsrooms. Jim Kitchell, a former general manager of news at NBC, became vice president of production and operations. Sam Zelman was vice president of news and executive producer. Bill MacPhail ran sports, Ted Kavanau led personnel, and Burt Reinhardt served as vice president of the network.

  In 1982 a dispute erupted over Schonfeld's firing of Sandi Freeman. Turner took over as chief executive, and Reinhardt, by then the executive vice president, became president.

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• 5. Hollywood and Wrestling

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  In 1981 Turner Broadcasting System acquired Brut Productions from Fabergé Cosmetics. After a failed attempt to buy CBS, Turner paid $1.5 billion in 1986 for the film studio MGM/UA Entertainment from Kirk Kerkorian. The deal left him with enormous debt, so he sold off pieces. Kerkorian bought back MGM/UA Entertainment, and the studio lot in Culver City went to Lorimar/Telepictures. Turner kept MGM's film and television library from before May 1986. Turner Entertainment Co. was established in August 1986 to oversee those holdings.

  That library held 2,200 films, and Turner syndicated them to television stations across the country. For older films shot in black-and-white, he aired colorized versions. Cinephiles, critics, actors and directors objected loudly. Roger Ebert wrote that a colorized Casablanca "will be one of the saddest days in the history of the movies," because it showed that no classic was safe from "the vulgarity of his computerized graffiti gangs." The uproar was one reason the Library of Congress created the National Film Registry, aimed at preserving American films in their original formats.

  In 1988 Turner Network Television, or TNT, launched with Gone with the Wind. It began with older movies and shows, then added original programs. Turner Classic Movies followed in 1994, built on his MGM films, Warner Bros. films made before 1948, all RKO films and a license for 1,000 other titles. In 1991 his companies bought Hanna-Barbera Productions from Great American Broadcasting. With the MGM library and early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, it formed the core of Cartoon Network, which launched on the 1st of October 1992.

  Wrestling had run on TBS since 1971, and Turner credited it with helping the station reach a national audience. In 1988 he bought Jim Crockett Promotions and renamed it World Championship Wrestling, or WCW. It became the chief competitor of Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation, a rivalry known as the Monday Night War that lasted through the 1990s. In 2001, under AOL Time Warner, WCW was sold to the WWF.

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• 6. Games and Gales

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  On the 3rd of January 1977, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Turner for a year. The cause was Turner's conduct while chasing free agent outfielder Gary Matthews, who signed a five-year, $1.875 million contract with the Braves on the 18th of November 1976. Kuhn pointed to remarks Turner made to Giants owner Bob Lurie during the 1976 World Series. The Braves also lost their first-round picks in the June 1978 draft. Turner appealed and Kuhn relented, restoring the picks, one of which became Bob Horner of Arizona State University.

  On the 11th of May 1977 the Braves had lost 16 games in a row. Turner sent manager Dave Bristol on a 10-day "scouting trip" and made himself interim manager, the first owner-manager in the majors since Connie Mack. His tenure lasted one game, a loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates. National League president Chub Feeney ordered him to stop, citing rules that bar managers and players from owning stock in their clubs. Kuhn rejected Turner's appeal, citing his "lack of familiarity with game operations."

  By the mid-1980s Turner was leaving daily baseball decisions to his baseball staff, and the Braves won the 1995 World Series. In 1996 he admitted, "For the 10 years I ran the team, it was a disaster." He added that the team did well once someone else took responsibility. Time Warner, which took control after the merger, sold the Braves to Liberty Media in 2007.

  Turner founded the Goodwill Games in 1986, hoping to ease tensions between capitalist and communist countries. Broadcasting them also gave his superstation Olympic-style sports programming. Turner Field, first used for the 1996 Summer Olympics as Centennial Olympic Stadium, was later converted for the Braves and named after him.

  Sailing was his other great arena. At 26 he entered competitions at the Savannah Yacht Club, and in 1964 he competed in Olympic trials. In 1966 he became Southern Ocean Racing Conference champion with his first cruising yacht, Vamp X. His first America's Cup attempt, in 1974 aboard the 12 Metre Mariner, ended in the defender trials when Ted Hood's Courageous beat him.

  In 1977 Hood and Lee Loomis invited Turner to join a New York Yacht Club defense syndicate. The group built a new boat, Independence, but in the trials Turner skippered the older Courageous and proved faster. From the 13th to the 18th of September 1977, Courageous swept the challenger Australia, skippered by Noel Robins, in four races. The widest margin was 2 minutes and 23 seconds.

  In the 1979 Fastnet Race, a storm killed 15 participants. Turner still skippered the 61-foot Tenacious to victory on corrected time. He entered the America's Cup Hall of Fame in 1993 and the National Sailing Hall of Fame in 2011.

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• 7. Mergers and Outbursts

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  On the 10th of October 1996, Turner Broadcasting System merged with Time Warner. Turner became vice chairman and head of the combined cable networks division. Chief executive Gerald Levin later removed him from that division, though he stayed on as vice chairman. In March 2001 Jamie Kellner succeeded him as head of Turner Broadcasting. Kellner also played a large part in cancelling WCW's television contracts.

  On the 11th of January 2001, America Online bought Time Warner, creating AOL Time Warner. Turner at first backed the merger. Then the dot-com bubble burst, and the AOL division dragged down the whole company's results and stock price. At a board meeting in fall 2001, Turner's outburst against Levin led to Levin's announced resignation, effective in early 2002. His successor, Richard Parsons, invited Turner back for strategic advice, but Turner never got the operational role he wanted.

  Turner was the company's largest individual shareholder, and he is estimated to have lost as much as $7 billion when the stock collapsed. Asked about buying back his old assets, he said he "can't afford them now." He resigned as vice chairman in 2003 and left the Time Warner board in 2006.

  In 1983 a yacht sponsored by Rupert Murdoch collided with Turner's Condor during the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, and Condor ran aground 6.2 miles from the finish. At the post-race dinner a drunken Turner berated Murdoch and challenged him to a televised fistfight in Las Vegas. When Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, Turner saw a rival to CNN. During the Time Warner merger he said the combined company would "squash Rupert Murdoch like a bug." Time Warner soon refused to carry Fox News on its New York City cable system. In 2003 Turner issued another fight challenge and called Murdoch a "warmonger" over the Iraq invasion. By 2019 he told Variety the two had made amends.

  Such remarks earned him the nicknames "The Mouth of the South" and "Captain Outrageous." In 1991 he and then-wife Jane Fonda drew anger from Native American groups by performing a "tomahawk chop" cheer on national television at the World Series. In 1990 he said Christianity was for losers, and apologized that year. In 1999 he apologized to Poland's deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski for a joke about Polish mine detectors. After a 2002 remark about terrorism in the Middle East, he apologized but defended himself: "I don't type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it." In 2008 he told MSNBC he no longer considered himself an atheist and had begun praying for ill friends.

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• 8. Land, Giving, Legacy

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  Turner Enterprises, founded in 1976, manages his land, investments and business interests, and now his estate. At about two million acres, he was the largest private landowner in the United States until John C. Malone passed him in 2011. His 920-square-mile Vermejo Reserve in New Mexico is the largest privately owned contiguous tract in the country. In 1994 he bought the 363,000-acre Armendaris Ranch, an old Spanish land grant in the Chihuahuan Desert. His roughly 51,000 bison, spread over 15 ranches, make the largest private herd in the world. They supplied his Ted's Montana Grill restaurant chain. In January 2016 the Osage Nation bought his 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch in Oklahoma.

  His giving was equally large. He donated $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation. In 2001 he co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with senator Sam Nunn to curb the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In 1990 he created the Turner Foundation for environmental and population issues, putting in $125 million of his own money. In 1989 he launched the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for fiction offering positive solutions to global problems. From 2,500 entries, the winner was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. He also created the environmental superhero Captain Planet, and in 2010 joined The Giving Pledge.

  He married three times: Judy Nye from 1960 to 1964, Jane Shirley Smith from 1965 to 1988, and Jane Fonda from 1991 to 2001. He wed Fonda on the 21st of December 1991, her birthday. He had five children. In 2018 he revealed that he had once considered running for president, but Fonda told him she would leave if he did.

  In 2018 Turner revealed a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia. In January 2025 he was hospitalized with pneumonia. He died on the 6th of May 2026, aged 87, at his 29,000-acre Avalon Plantation home in Lamont, Florida, and he is buried at Bullock Community Cemetery in Brantley, Alabama.

  Slate called him "the Alexander the Great of broadcasting." Nearly a dozen cable networks launched on his model, including ESPN, MTV, Showtime and the Discovery Channel. Eric Bischoff, WCW's second-in-command, remembered him as someone who "was more afraid of not trying and not conquering that next horizon." Fonda said he swept into her life as a "swashbuckling pirate." On the day he died, AEW aired a tribute on TBS, with Tony Schiavone and Sting delivering the eulogy.

  In 2019 the Atlanta site that had housed Turner Broadcasting System since 1980 was renamed the Ted Turner Campus.

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