Ted Turner, the enterprise magnate who based NCS and Turner Broadcasting System, has died. He was 87.
Turner Enterprises introduced the information, reporting the billionaire entrepreneur and famous environmentalist, who was beforehand married to actress Jane Fonda, died on Wednesday, May 6.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” NCS CEO Mark Thompson mentioned in an announcement. “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of NCS. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world.”
Born Robert Edward Turner III on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Turner moved at the age of 9 to Savannah, Ga., the place his father ran a billboard promoting firm. Following his father’s dying in 1963, Turner took over the family business, Turner Advertising. In 1970, he entered the TV business by means of the acquisition of the struggling Atlanta-based station UHF.
Turner invented the “superstation” in 1975, which used a satellite tv for pc to broadcast the TV channel that went on to change into Turner Broadcasting System, or TBS. The following 12 months, Turner continued to flex his enterprise muscle tissue by shopping for the Atlanta Braves so he may broadcast the Major League Baseball staff’s video games on his station.
His most notable achievement was the creation of NCS, the primary 24-hour information community, in 1980. The success of NCS — which counted an viewers of 165 million households all over the world going into the twenty first century — noticed Turner Broadcasting expanding into other businesses together with NCS Headline News, NCS International, TNT, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies.
Ted Turner is honored with the Film Independent Humanitarian Award in 2014
Credit: Frazer Harrison/WireImage
Turner offered Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner in 1996 for $7.3 billion in inventory (Time Warner would go on to purchase AOL in 2001). He served as vice chairman of the corporate till 2003 and resigned from the board in 2006.
In addition to his enterprise enterprise successes, Turner was additionally a acknowledged philanthropist and the chairman of the Turner Foundation, which he based in 1990 to assist environmental causes. That similar 12 months, he collaborated on the launch of the animated sequence Captain Planet and the Planeteers to advertise teen environmental activism.
Credit: Ben Rose/Getty
He pledged to donate $1 billion to the United Nations in 1997, and the next 12 months created the United Nations Foundation, which goals to advertise a extra simply world. He then based the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2001 to guard the globe from nuclear weapons.
His daughter Laura Turner Seydel referred to as her father a “real-life Captain Planet” in an interview with PEOPLE in 2021. She adopted in his footsteps with a sequence of organizations and initiatives aimed at benefiting the planet.
Captain Planet, Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner attend the Captain Planet Foundation’s 2012 profit gala in Atlanta
Credit: Ben Rose/Getty
Turner was often known as a yachtsman. He piloted his yacht Courageous to win the 1977 America’s Cup and was inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame in 1993.
He was the third-largest particular person landowner in America, with greater than 2 million acres of property, in keeping with the 2025 Land Report 100. He owned 45,000 bison on 14 ranches in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico and South Dakota. He had three ranches in Argentina as effectively.
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The media mogul had three wives, all of whom he subsequently divorced: Judy Nye, from 1960 to 1964; Jane Shirley Smith, from 1965 to 1988; and Fonda, from 1991 to 2001.
In Fonda’s 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, she mentioned Turner swooped in as quickly as he heard about her cut up from second husband Tom Hayden. “There were times when something would set us to laughing so hard we’d sink to the floor, like the night when our guffaws collapsed us at the foot of the Gone With the Wind staircase at his plantation and we had to crawl up to bed on hands and knees,” she wrote.
But a month after their marriage, she found out Turner was cheating on her, and she turned to consuming to uninteresting her frustration over Turner’s restlessness, their stunted communication and fixed travels.
Fonda additionally retired from acting following her nuptials with Turner. “I left for 15 years, when I married Ted Turner, and I did not think I was gonna come back, ’cause when I married him, I thought it’d be forever,” Fonda informed Entertainment Tonight in 2023.
Jane Fonda and Ted Turner on their wedding ceremony day
In September 2018, Turner revealed he was identified with Lewy body dementia in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s. It’s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer’s is fatal,” Turner mentioned of LBD, which is brought on by irregular protein deposits that construct up over time and disrupt regular mind operate.
“Thank goodness I don’t have that. But, I also have got, let’s — the one that’s — I can’t remember the name of it,” he mentioned, pausing momentarily earlier than including, “Dementia. I can’t remember what my disease is.”
“Lewy Body dementia is the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Alex Pantelyat, Director of Atypical Parkinsonism Center and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins beforehand informed PEOPLE in November 2015. “It is an incredibly devastating disease. It affects your core, it affects who you are as a person. In the case of DLB and some of these other related disorders it tends to a great extent affect the frontal lobe, which is really what makes us human. It’s really unbelievably devastating.”
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For his contributions to media throughout his lifetime, Turner was the recipient of quite a few awards and recognitions. He was named TIME journal’s Man of the Year in 1991 and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame the identical 12 months. Turner received a Peabody Award in 1997 and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Communication in 2000.
Turner is survived by his 5 kids, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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