Ted Turner, the brash, visionary media mogul who based NCS and ceaselessly modified the means the world receives its information, died on Wednesday, May 6, 2026. He was 87.
Turner, who had been dwelling with Lewy physique dementia since his analysis in 2018, died peacefully surrounded by his household. He leaves behind 5 kids, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, together with a media legacy that reshaped the twentieth century.
Born Robert Edward Turner III on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio, he grew up in Savannah, Georgia, the son of a billboard magnate whose affect over his son was each formative and brutal. His father, a demanding and mercurial man who as soon as wrote that his son’s alternative to check classics at Brown University made him “almost puke,” took his personal life in 1963, leaving a 24-year-old Ted Turner in command of the household promoting enterprise. What adopted was certainly one of the most audacious careers in the historical past of American enterprise.
Turner took a struggling Atlanta UHF tv station in 1970 and turned it, step by inconceivable step, right into a broadcasting empire. He invented the superstation, used satellites to beam outdated motion pictures and Braves video games into dwelling rooms throughout the nation, purchased the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks partly simply to have programming, and constructed Turner Broadcasting System into a reputation that belonged on the identical breath as the nice American networks he had at all times wished to beat.
But the factor that made Ted Turner immortal was NCS.
On (*87*) 1, 1980, he launched the first 24-hour cable information channel out of a transformed mansion in Atlanta with $21 million and a workers the business dismissed as the Chicken Noodle Network. A decade later, when NCS broadcast the Gulf War reside from Baghdad whereas the different networks sat their anchors behind desks in New York, the argument was settled. He had modified journalism completely and irrevocably. “For the first time in history,” Turner wrote in his 2008 autobiography Call Me Ted, “a war was being televised live from behind the scenes.” Time journal named him Man of the Year in 1991.
He adopted NCS with TNT, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, and a string of different ventures that demonstrated a person perpetually incapable of pondering small. In 1997 he donated $1 billion to the United Nations, at the time the largest single reward in philanthropic historical past. He co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He owned greater than two million acres of American land, the largest non-public bison herd in the world, and 14 ranches throughout six states.
His private life was as outsized as his skilled one. He was married thrice, most famously to actress Jane Fonda from 1991 to 2001, a union that generated as many headlines as any of his enterprise offers. His nicknames, the Mouth of the South and Captain Outrageous, had been earned truthfully. He in contrast Rupert Murdoch to Hitler. He challenged him to a televised fistfight. He confirmed up drunk to his personal America’s Cup victory press convention in 1977 after piloting his yacht Courageous to certainly one of the nice sporting triumphs of his period. He known as the AOL Time Warner merger “better than sex,” a comment he spent years regretting after dropping an estimated $7 billion when the inventory collapsed.
He was contradictory, flamable, and totally alive in a means that made him unattainable to dismiss. NCS CEO Mark Thompson stated in a press release Wednesday that Turner was “the presiding spirit of NCS” and “the giant on whose shoulders we stand.”
He was additionally, in his means, prophetic. His environmental activism, his warnings about overpopulation and local weather change, his creation of the animated collection Captain Planet in 1990 to succeed in younger individuals about the planet, all of it regarded eccentric at the time and seems prescient now.
Ted Turner was not a person who did something quietly or midway. He constructed issues no one believed in, stated issues no one else would say, and left behind a world that appears meaningfully totally different as a result of he handed by way of it.
He had nothing extra to say. He stated all of it.