NCS founder Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer, dies at age 87

NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash television pioneer who raced yachts, owned big chunks of the American West and remodeled the information enterprise by launching NCS and introducing the 24-hour cable information cycle, died Wednesday. He was 87.

Turner died surrounded by his household, in line 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 gorgeous $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three ladies — 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 television enterprise, he targeting philanthropy.

His garrulous character typically overshadowed a risk-taking enterprise acumen. By the time he bought his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in 1996, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard firm into a international 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 demise, known 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 television community in 1980. In half, Turner’s personal frustration with television information was the instigator. He typically labored previous 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air.

He took a probability by beginning the operation within the early days of cable television, residing in an condominium above its Atlanta workplace.

NCS’s breakthrough second got here throughout the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad however NCS stayed, capturing arresting photographs of a battle’s outbreak.

Turner was promised a continued position in NCS after his firm’s sale to Time Warner however was regularly pushed out, a lot to his remorse.

“The mistake I made was losing control of the company,” he later said.

Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University, Turner came to Atlanta to work for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.

After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.

On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation.

TBS’ motley collection of old movies and sitcom reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans nationwide through their superstation exposure.

In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism. But the acquisition gave his company a library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks.

He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”

For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.

Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.

He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023 but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.

“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money,” Turner once said.

Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.

Turner, the father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion to United Nations charities.

He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches.

Bauder, a longtime media author, retired from The Associated Press in 2026. Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.