Ted Turner, CNN founder, business maverick and ‘Mouth of the South,’ dies at 87
The swashbuckling Atlanta entrepreneur Ted Turner told TV interviewer Charlie Rose in 2004, “I had one of the most incredible runs in human history.”
But in quieter moments, he wondered if he had accomplished enough.
Turner improbably transformed his father’s Georgia billboard advertising company into an Atlanta-based global media empire and redefined how the planet gets news and entertainment. He funded an international sports competition in the name of world peace and bought sports teams including the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks. He married a movie star, championed yacht racing and environmental causes. He tried to eliminate nuclear weapons and became for a time one of the nation’s largest private landowners.
A billionaire, he gave away much of his fortune in hopes of eradicating some of the world’s greatest problems and threats.
All the while, the founder of CNN self-narrated his successes and opined on anything asked about with a blunt, sometimes biting, often funny outspokenness that earned him the monikers “the Mouth of the South,” and “Captain Outrageous.”
Turner lived long enough to witness his revolutionary creations challenged by newer models, and he publicly and bitterly lost control of the business empire he built.
He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2018 how he hoped to be remembered: “He was a good person and tried to help make the world a better place. ... I’m still working on it. I think it is a little better.”
Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III died peacefully Wednesday, surrounded by his family, according to a spokesperson for the family. He was 87.
He had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder similar to Alzheimer’s disease. The once irrepressible talker often remained quiet at his few public appearances late in life. But at his 80th birthday party in Atlanta in 2018, he took the stage in front of hundreds of family members and friends, including actress Jane Fonda — the ex-wife that referred to him as her favorite ex-husband.
He thanked them for the celebration and serenaded them with “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Home on the Range,” as they sang along.
Turner ranks as perhaps the most significant and influential business leader in Georgia since Coca-Cola magnate Robert Woodruff. By launching the 24-hour news channel CNN in Atlanta, rather than in a bigger, more prominent metropolis, he bestowed an unlikely level of international attention on a city aching for such a spotlight. He reflected Atlanta’s underdog punch-above-its-weight-class attitude. And like many Atlantans, he was a transplant.
His father, Ed Turner, moved the family from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Savannah after World War II and started the Turner Advertising billboard company.
Turner’s overachieving drive was shaped, for better and sometimes worse, by the lurking presence of his dad.
The elder Turner was a demanding man who worked hard, drank heavily and struggled with bouts of depression, Ted Turner’s biographers say. Turner sometimes disciplined Ted by beating him with a leather strap. He sent his son away to military boarding school as a young child and rarely visited him, believing that instilling a sense of insecurity in him would give Turner more drive, the biographers wrote.
“You won’t hardly ever find a superachiever anywhere that isn’t … motivated at least partially by a sense of insecurity,’’ Ted Turner said in a 1991 TV interview with David Frost.
His father, who never lived to see his son’s success, also made Turner read two books a week. He told Turner to never set goals he could reach, because if he accomplished them there would be nothing left, biographer Porter Bibb wrote in his 1993 book, “It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks: Ted Turner’s Amazing Story.”
When Ted was a freshman at Brown University in Rhode Island and chose to major in the classics, Ed Turner made his disgust at that choice clear.
“I almost puked on my way home today,” Ed Turner wrote him.
Ted changed to economics, but was kicked out of school in his senior year for having a woman visitor in his dormitory room.
Turner returned to Atlanta in 1960 and joined the billboard business as a salesperson, got married and had two kids. But he didn’t know of the growing strain on the company. The elder Turner had agreed to sell part of it by 1963, then committed suicide. Ted was 24.
Turner told Time Magazine in 1991 that his father’s death “left me alone, because I had counted on him to make the judgment of whether or not I was a success.”
Building an empire
He fought to regain control of the business and began its expansion. He bought a radio station, and in 1970, he stepped foot into the world that would bring him fame. He bought the struggling Atlanta UHF station Channel 17 and turned it around.
As he rolled up money and assets, he made perhaps the most transformative decision of his career. He turned his little TV station into a national network in 1976 — the TBS Superstation — by bouncing its signal off a satellite to cable systems around the nation. He filled its airwaves with Atlanta Braves baseball games, old movies, head-butting wrestling shows, reruns and the few new programs he could afford, such as a soap opera with heavy doses of infidelity.
Outside of work, Turner sharpened his passion of competitive sailing and raised his public profile by captaining his boat the Courageous to win the prestigious America’s Cup in 1977.
Turner was newly rich, and his bigmouthed and sometimes drunken behavior grated on his old-moneyed hosts who ruled sailing competitions, Sports Illustrated reported. The New York Yacht Club’s chairman told Turner “Ted, sometimes I wish you were a dog, so I could beat you.”
Shortly after his win, Turner and Reese Schonfeld began cooking up the idea of a 24-hour news channel, which launched in 1980 as Cable News Network — CNN — the world’s first live, 24-hour global news network.
A Washington Post reporter penned, “the premiere will be greeted with almost universal skepticism both by the TV and financial communities alike.”
The reporter was right, to begin with. CNN squeezed Turner’s resources for years as it struggled to make a profit. But Turner promised he was in for the long haul.
“We won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world live, and that will be our last event,” he said.
At the same time, he insulted the quality of programming on the big three broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC. He criticized their coverage of the Vietnam War as anti-American and suggested that shows such as “Charlie’s Angels” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” were “poisoning” the nation. He loudly proposed launching a fourth broadcast network.
He made a hostile bid to buy CBS, but it failed.
CNN found its audience in 1990 when it scooped the world by reporting the opening of the first Gulf War from Baghdad as American bombs fell on the city.
Later, in 2011, Turner told the AJC’s then-columnist Henry Unger: “Of my business accomplishments, I’m proudest of CNN because it brought information to people who were deprived.... There are 99 24-hour news networks in the world today. ... It’s amazing. When we started, there were zero.”
Turner pieced together a media juggernaut. He started or bought a portfolio of cable news and entertainment brands, including Turner Classic Movies, TNT and the Cartoon Network.
“I’m like the bear that went over the mountain to see what he could see,” he said in a 1994 interview with the AJC. “One thing opened up another, and I kept moving on.”
Turner, whose favorite movie was “Gone With the Wind,” saw himself as a Rhett Butler, the movie’s hero.
As he innovated and bought, Turner constantly left his operations short of cash, focusing more on building assets than profits.
Former Time Warner chief financial officer Wayne Pace, who worked for years as a Turner money adviser, recalled visiting a struggling Turner TV station in Charlotte in the 1970s when an accountant ran in blurting: “The sheriff is downstairs, and he wants to padlock the place because we haven’t paid our payroll taxes!”
Turner explained his style to interviewer Charlie Rose: “No guts, no glory. I have plenty of guts.”
He added: “You also have to be right.”
And he was. The empire gained momentum and eventually captured more than half the advertising dollars spent on cable.
Mouth of the South
As his assets piled up, so did his fame. His quotes got as much attention as his business conquests. He compared rival media tycoon Rupert Murdoch to Adolf Hitler and challenged him to a boxing match.
He told a gathering of TV critics that anti-abortion proponents were “idiots,” adding, “The pro-lifers say, ‘We don’t want people to have sex for fun, only to have babies.’ …. Well, that’s fine if those people don’t want to ever have sex. Swell. I happen to enjoy it. I don’t get near as much as I want to.”
He told people that he would be perfect, if he had just a bit of humility, and gave this assessment of his mental acuity: “I’m not that brilliant. I mean, basically I know what my IQ was. I was only in the 97th percentile. Three percent of the people in this country are smarter than me, and with 300 million people, that’s a couple — that’s millions of people that are smarter than me, basically.”
He gained a reputation as a playboy and a philanderer. He outfitted his office at CNN Center with a bed that folded away into a wall. He married three times — the last time to Fonda — and had five children with his first two wives. Like his father, he was demanding and driving with his kids — filling the vacations he spent with them from sunup to sundown with nonstop activities.
He mixed his off-the-cuff observations with enough antics to make people wonder if there were more madness than genius to Turner. As owner of the Atlanta Braves in 1977, he challenged an opposing team’s pitcher to a contest pushing a baseball with their noses down the first-base line. And then he got on his hands and knees and did it as the befuddled pitcher watched.
Former Braves player Darrell Chaney recalled to ESPN decades later, “When Ted got up from rolling the ball he had blood from his forehead all the way down the top of his nose. …Those kinds of things he wanted to win, even something like that. He was all out.”
Turner used his fame and money to support his favorite causes. A lover of nature and wildness, he amassed over 2 million acres of spreads and ranches in North America and Argentina.
Before retiring in 2024, longtime CNN vet Jack Womack met Turner for lunch and asked him what he thought was his greatest accomplishment outside of CNN. Turner’s answer: the restoration of the buffalo population in the United States.
Turner developed a fascination with buffalo as a child, as they were reduced down to 1,000 animals. He became the biggest bison rancher in the world, with a herd of 45,000. He also owns one of the only privately held herds of Yellowstone bison, the foundation for many other bison herds in the U.S.
In 2002, Turner launched a chain of restaurants, Ted’s Montana Grill, with restaurateur George McKerrow with a menu featuring bison in the hope that it would make raising them sustainable.
He was also a major proponent of renewable energy and advocated developing a smart grid for the transmission of natural energy. He wanted to make his land available for wind and solar power wherever it was appropriate.
His pushed his media empire to reflect his work. He aired an environmental do-good series on the Cartoon Network and funded documentaries on subjects such as the Cold War and the environment.
He cofounded an organization to curb weapons of mass destruction, and — after the United States led a 65-nation boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, and the Soviets responded by leading 15 Communist nations to boycott the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles — Turner created the Goodwill Games, an international sporting event, to try to thaw relations between the Cold War foes.
Turner spoke out on global issues — hunger, AIDS, pollution and overpopulation — and chided fellow tycoons for not being more philanthropic.
“I’m not going to rest until all the world’s problems have been solved,” Turner told Time Magazine. “Homelessness, AIDS. I’m in great shape. I mean, the problems will survive me — no question about it.”
He would soon get his chance to focus more on those issues than business.
Losing an empire and finding his causes
Turner’s high-wire business practices set the stage for his eventual loss of control of Turner Broadcasting. He bought the vast but aging Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer entertainment conglomerate in 1986 for $1.5 billion. It gave him dibs on material to fill his company’s growing need for content with movie classics, including “Gone With the Wind,” and cartoons. But the massive costs strained his company. Turner was forced within months to seek a bailout from a conglomerate of cable system operators. In return, they got seats on the board of his company and, more important, won veto power over big purchases that allowed them to rein in his rule.
“Things used to be more exciting around here,” he said in 1988. “But you can’t live like that all the time anyway.”
By 1996, convinced his media empire would be marginalized by bigger players, Turner sold it to Time Warner for $7.5 billion and took a position as the company’s vice chairman. It was a decision he would regret.
But, newly enriched by the sale, he announced in 1997 he would give the United Nations $1 billion, at $100 million a year, for peace, development and poverty relief programs. At the time, he reveled in the joy of giving and told the AJC: “I’ve never been happier or more pleased with myself than I am today.”
In 2001, Time Warner announced it would merge with internet darling AOL, with Turner’s enthusiastic approval.
The deal was a disaster. It sharply cut the stock value of the combined company as online ventures lost favor. AOL’s subscriber base shrank, and investors questioned the synergies between the businesses. Turner’s personal fortune — largely wrapped up in company stock — sank dramatically, causing him to ask the U.N. to extend the time he had to complete his billion-dollar donation.
At the same time, company crown jewel, CNN, had responded slowly to the threat of a rival network, Murdoch’s Fox News. It was losing its perch atop the ratings.
Turner held the title of vice chairman of the nation’s biggest media company and was the largest individual shareholder, but he was elbowed aside and his pet projects, such as the Goodwill Games, were eliminated.
He bemoaned what he saw as a reduction of CNN’s coverage of the environment and international affairs for its U.S. audience, saying, “there’s a little more concentration on the stories that grab the headlines, like Michael Jackson and the pervert of the day.”
Turner’s inevitable separation from the company was a bitter one. He told friends company chairman Gerald Levin treated him poorly. He complained publicly that he had been “fired.” Turner eventually helped push Levin out, but he didn’t regain control of his networks.
In May of 2006 at age 67, he called it quits, deciding not to stand for reelection to Time Warner’s board of directors at the annual meeting. Turner told shareholders, “I just wish that in the past five years I could have made a bigger contribution. … I didn’t have the opportunity.”
After telling Rose in 2004 he had one of humanity’s greatest runs, he added: “… losing my job, losing my fortune and having other personal problems of quite significant magnitude, humbled me, brought me down off my high horse.”
Still, he remained a billionaire even late in life — Forbes listed his worth at $2.8 billion as of April 2026, and he continued using his money to promote his causes.
In 2017, he sold St. Phillips Island in South Carolina for a reported bargain basement price. He had owned it for 40 years, eradicating aggressive feral hogs and restoring the habitats of imperiled fox squirrels, Eastern indigo snakes, and loggerhead turtles. The 4,680-acre barrier island is now part of Hunting Island State Park.
In 2021, he donated an 80,000-acre ranch he owns in Nebraska to a nonprofit agriculture ecosystem research institute he created. He said at the time that despite being owned by a nonprofit, he would continue paying taxes on the property to support local communities.
In his later years, Turner was spotted occasionally strolling along downtown Atlanta streets near his penthouse with its view of the former CNN Center while unashamedly practicing an eccentricity for a billionaire. He’d stoop to pick up trash and throw it in wastebaskets, and still visited his same barbershop around the corner from the building.
“Well, if we had more people picking up trash than putting it down, we’d live in a clean world, wouldn’t we?” he told the AJC.
As his health worsened, his public appearances and pronouncements petered out. A portion of Spring Street in downtown Atlanta was named Ted Turner Drive in his honor. But the Turner Broadcasting moniker was largely retired from his former businesses. And Turner Field, known as “The Ted,” was sold and renamed following the Atlanta Braves baseball team’s move to Cobb County.
Still, Turner left behind a maverick image that was hard to forget.
His biographer Bibb wrote that Turner sometimes asked people: “Now tell me the truth. Wouldn’t you really rather be Ted Turner?”
“It’s a hell of a lot of fun,” Turner would add, “but I’ll tell you something, kiddo. It ain’t as easy as it looks.”
TED TURNER’S LIFE
1938: Born Nov. 19 in Cincinnati.
1947: Moves with family to Savannah.
1963: Becomes president of Turner Advertising Co., his late father’s billboard company.
1970: Buys WJRJ-TV Channel 17, an independent TV station in Atlanta.
1973: Adds Atlanta Braves games to his TV station lineup.
1976: Launches TBS Superstation; buys the Atlanta Braves.
1977: Wins America’s Cup yacht race; buys the Atlanta Hawks basketball team.
1979: Turner and his racing team on the yacht Tenacious hit disastrous weather on the 600-mile Fastnet race and are feared dead. They were not and ended up winning the race.
1980: Launches CNN.
1985: Starts the Goodwill Games.
1986: Buys Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film empire.
1991: Named “Man of the Year” by Time Magazine. He marries actress Jane Fonda.
1992: Launches Cartoon Network.
1996: Sells Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner.
1997: Pledges $1 billion to the United Nations.
2000: AOL and Time Warner announce plans to merge.
2001: AOL Time Warner becomes one company, and Turner becomes vice chairman. Turner and Fonda divorce.
2002: Cofounds Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that serves bison.
2003: Announces in January that he will resign as vice chairman of AOL Time Warner’s board, effective in May 2003, but remains as a nonexecutive member of the board. His documentary production company, Ted Turner Documentaries airs its first series, “Avoiding Armageddon,” about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
2003: In May, sells 60 million shares of AOL Time Warner, which later in the year drops “AOL” from its name. The stock, worth about $784 million, helps offset Turner’s estimated loss of $40 to $50 million on the Civil War film “Gods and Generals.”
2004: Receives the 2,251st star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
2005: Recognized as an Advertising Hall of Fame honoree; named one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 Most Generous Philanthropists.
2006: Leaves the board of Time Warner, ending his official ties to the company.
2015: City of Atlanta renames a portion of Spring Street in downtown “Ted Turner Drive.”
2016: Turner Field, nicknamed “The Ted,” hosts its last Atlanta Braves game. The facility is renovated and becomes part of Georgia State University.
2018: Turner announces he has Lewy body dementia. AT&T completes purchase of Time Warner, which includes Turner, HBO and Warner Bros.
2019: AT&T’s WarnerMedia drops the Turner Broadcasting name for its business unit. It later names its Techwood campus in Midtown after Ted Turner, posting a plaque describing him as “the original maverick” and “pioneer in the media industry” and “champion of the environment.”
2021: AT&T announces it will spin off WarnerMedia, including some former Turner brands, combining them with Discovery.
2023: CNN moves out of downtown’s CNN Center to the Techwood campus.
2026: Paramount Skydance announces a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, including the Turner networks.
About the Authors
Matt Kempner is a veteran, award-winning journalist who seeks out the twists behind our adventures with business, money, careers, power and government. A former columnist and editor, he assignments have included business investigations, energy, the economy, entrepreneurs, big business, consumer spending, politics, government and the environment.
Christopher Quinn is a writer and editor who has worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 1999. He writes stories on Veterans Affairs, business including high-tech growth in metro Atlanta, Georgia's $72 billion farm economy, and he oversees assigning and editing news obituaries.
