NEW YORK — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken 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 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 and investments.
Turner owned skilled sports activities groups in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a beautiful $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 since out of the television enterprise, he focused on philanthropy and his greater than 2 million acres of property, together with the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous persona typically overshadowed a pushed, risk-taking enterprise acumen. By the time he offered his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard firm into a world 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.”
“Whenever I needed him, he was there, always willing to fight for a good cause!” Trump posted on social media.
The creation of NCS
Turner’s signature achievement was creating NCS, the primary 24-hour, all-news television community in 1980. At a time information is immediately out there at anybody’s fingertips, it’s laborious to recall that the thought of letting customers determine after they select to be taught what’s happening on the planet was as soon as revolutionary.
In half, Turner’s personal frustration with television information was the instigator. He usually labored previous 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in mattress by the point his native stations did their very own newscasts at 11 p.m.
He took a likelihood by beginning the operation typically derided because the “chicken noodle network” within the early days of cable television, dwelling in an residence above its Atlanta workplace.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
NCS’s breakthrough second got here in the course of the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American assault. NCS stayed, capturing arresting photographs of a warfare’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking throughout the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued function in NCS after his firm’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in inventory, however was steadily pushed out, a lot to his remorse.
“I made a mistake,” he later stated. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That identical yr — 1996 — noticed the beginning of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable information, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion turned the inventory in commerce of networks like Fox News and MSNBC.
Building TBS TremendousStation
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in (*87*). When he was 9, his household moved to Savannah, Georgia, the place he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner got here to Atlanta to work as an account government 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 methods across the nation through satellite tv for pc. It turned the TBS TremendousStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner stated in 1996.
TBS’ motley assortment of previous motion pictures and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted followers throughout the nation via their superstation publicity and within the Eighties started declaring themselves “America’s Team.”
Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one recreation, helped open baseball’s free-agent worth wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.
In the Eighties, Turner went deeply into debt to purchase MGM, a transfer once more greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his firm a big library of classic motion pictures that finally have been parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older motion pictures earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was additionally criticized for including shade to basic motion pictures like “Casablanca,” which he stated he did to make them interesting to a youthful viewers.
TBS additionally acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, advised The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
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.”
Asked to share the key to his success, he stated: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
Acquiring sports activities groups and land
For a lot of his life a partying roustabout who wooed lovely girls with a roguish appeal, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married thrice. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She stop appearing whereas married to Turner, however uninterested in his philandering and divorced him, though they remained associates.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda stated of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an surprising friendship with Cuban chief Fidel Castro, bonding over searching and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A as soon as bitter rival who in contrast Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the atmosphere.
Turner constructed a sports activities empire, at one level proudly owning skilled baseball, basketball and hockey groups in Atlanta. He was finest remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the Nineties. Their stadium, constructed for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves changed it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.
Perhaps Turner’s best 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. He spoke usually of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 began a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with serving to enhance 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.
During a inventory market bust, Turner’s web value went from almost $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.
“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or almost $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”
He had sufficient time, and cash, to commit to such lofty targets as selling world peace and defending the atmosphere.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner as soon as stated. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
‘The Mouth of the South’
Through the years, Turner’s antics often overshadowed his enterprise actions.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the ground at the victory celebration.
Turner managed to insult many together with his shoot-from-the-lip fashion. 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.
He as soon as prompt in a speech that unemployed Black individuals be used to haul cell missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he stated he was simply joking.
Other occasions, his humor saved him from doubtlessly awkward conditions, like when he talked to an viewers in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner stated, in line with The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Turner, father of 5 kids, grabbed a management function in American philanthropy together with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to offer $1 billion, or $100 million a yr for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving cash to the U.N., calling it the perfect hope for peace.
Dedication to numerous causes
He promoted a vary of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start out the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit devoted to decreasing the specter of nuclear, organic and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly concerning the world’s issues.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner stated in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured tens of millions into nonprofits on a world scale, Turner was additionally keen on spreading his wealth in small methods. He as soon as gave $500 to a volunteer hearth division that helped extinguish a blaze on certainly one of his ranches. Another time he lent private work for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.
___
Bauder, a longtime media author, retired from The Associated Press in 2026. Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.