Ted Turner, the brash Ohio-born media tycoon who turned a struggling Atlanta billboard business into one of the most powerful broadcasting empires in television history, died peacefully on Wednesday, surrounded by his family at his estate in Lamont, Florida. He was 87. Turner Enterprises confirmed his passing, and the world of media has not stopped talking since.
Turner launched CNN on June 1, 1980, and changed the way the world consumed news forever
Turner had been living with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder he first disclosed publicly in 2018 during a conversation with Ted Koppel on CBS Sunday Morning.
“It’s similar to Alzheimer’s, but not nearly as bad,” he told Koppel at the time, in the kind of plainspoken, no-filter delivery that defined him for six decades in public life.
The network he built, CNN, went on the air on June 1, 1980, out of a converted Jewish country club in Atlanta, as the first 24-hour cable news channel in American history. The idea was laughed at by nearly everyone in broadcasting at the time.
Turner pushed forward anyway. “If Alexander the Great could conquer the known world, why couldn’t I start CNN?” he once told Oprah Winfrey.
The network gained its global footprint during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, delivering live satellite coverage that no one else could match, and from that point on the argument was over.
But CNN was only one piece of it.
Turner built TBS into the country’s first cable superstation, launched TNT, Cartoon Network, and Turner Classic Movies, owned the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, won the America’s Cup in 1977 as a competitive yachtsman, gave $1 billion to the United Nations, co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative to push for global nuclear disarmament, and became one of the largest private landowners in the United States, where he devoted much of his later life to conservation and reintroducing bison to the American west.
He even created Captain Planet, the animated series, to teach children about the environment. The man did not do small things.
CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson said in a statement, “Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgment. He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN.“
Jane Fonda, who was married to Turner from 1991 to 2001 and whom he described in 2012 as probably the great love of his life, posted a lengthy tribute on Instagram. “Ted Turner swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate, and I’ve never been the same,” she wrote. “He had a big life, a brilliant mind, and a soaring sense of humor. I loved Ted with all my heart.”
Even Rupert Murdoch, his longtime rival and the man he once threatened to fight with his fists in Las Vegas, released a statement praising Turner’s vision. “His impact as a trailblazer has left an indelible mark on our cultural landscape. He was a great American and friend,” Murdoch said.
Turner is survived by five children. He was 87.
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