Turner trashes ex-Time Warner boss on Google decision

By Larry Hartstein

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ted Turner used a renewable energy conference Monday as a forum to blast his former Time Warner colleagues.

Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Turner went off on a blistering tangent, ridiculing Time Warner executives for selling the company's stake in Google too soon and for not selling CNNfn to Rupert Murdoch.

"This is what I said at the Time Warner board room. I'm not on the board anymore because they didn't get it, but I said ‘we've got to stop doing the dumb things and start doing the smart things,'" said Turner, the 71-year-old CNN founder. "We had 5 percent of Google in a music merger and I said to [former CEO] Dick Parsons, ‘Dick, I think we ought to hang onto that Google stock.' This was about 10 years ago. He said, ‘That company's a bunch of bull---.'"

Turner Broadcasting System merged with Time Warner in 1996, with Turner serving as vice chairman and head of Time Warner's cable networks division.

"Then, listen to this one," he continued, drawing laughs. "We had CNNfn, which was in 50 million homes, as Fox [Business] is in now. And they made the decision to close it down. It was breaking even, a cable network that was breaking even. We should have been in there competing with CNBC and Bloomberg.

"They closed it down without even calling Rupert up, who said publicly he was looking really hard at getting into the financial news business," Turner said. "We could have gotten $100 milllion or $200 million from him just for the name and the 50 million subscribers. They didn't even call him -- they closed it down without even doing that, and he was sitting there with the money wanting to give it to ‘em.

"I mean, you know, how dumb can you be?"

The panel, featuring Turner and entrepeneur T. Boone Pickens, was moderated by Michael Milken. Click here for video of the panel; Turner's rant starts at 26:05.