Ted Turner

Robert Edward Turner III (November 19, 1938 – May 6, 2026) built a media empire from his father’s billboard company, which he took over in March 1963 after his father’s suicide at age 53. That business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, was worth $1 million at the time. He launched the Turner Broadcasting System after buying an Atlanta UHF station in 1970. Turner is best known for creating CNN, the world’s first 24-hour cable news channel, in 1980. He also started WTBS, which established the superstation model for cable, along with TNT, TBS, The Cartoon Network, and Turner Classic Movies. In 1988, he purchased Jim Crockett Promotions and turned it into World Championship Wrestling (WCW), a promotion that briefly surpassed the World Wrestling Federation in popularity during the mid-1990s Monday Night War. Turner owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which won the 1995 World Series, and he made the team a nationally popular franchise. He also launched the charitable Goodwill Games. A strong supporter of professional wrestling on television, he had aired wrestling on TBS since 1971 and credited it with helping the channel gain a national audience as cable expanded.

As a philanthropist, Turner gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation, a public charity aimed at increasing U.S. support for the UN, and served as its board co-chairman. In 2001, he co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with U.S. senator Sam Nunn, a nonpartisan group focused on reducing global reliance on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In 2020, Forbes gave Turner a perfect philanthropy score of 5, putting him among just ten Forbes 400 members—alongside Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Eli Broad—who had each donated at least 20% of their fortune. Turner was known for his controversial remarks, earning him the nicknames “The Mouth of the South” and “Captain Outrageous.” He was the largest private landowner in the United States until John C. Malone surpassed him in 2011. Much of his land was used for ranches to popularize bison meat for his Ted’s Montana Grill chain, and he amassed the world’s largest privately owned bison herd. He devoted significant assets to environmental causes and created the environmental-themed animated series *Captain Planet and the Planeteers*.

Turner was born on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Florence Rooney and Robert Edward Turner II, a billboard magnate. At age nine, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he was raised as an Episcopalian. He attended The McCallie School, a private boys’ prep school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At Brown University, he served as vice-president of the Brown Debating Union and captain of the sailing team, and he joined Kappa Sigma. He initially majored in classics, a choice his father called “appalling” and said made him “almost puked.” Turner switched to economics but was expelled for having a female student in his dormitory room. He received an honorary B.A. from Brown in November 1989 when he gave the keynote address at the National Association of College Broadcasters’ second annual conference. To fulfill his national service obligation before being drafted, he joined the United States Coast Guard Reserve. The United States Navy Memorial honored him with its Lone Sailor Award in 2013; he told *The Washington Post*, “I liked boats,” and was deployed to “some pretty sweet places — Charleston and Fort Lauderdale.”

After leaving Brown in late 1960, Turner returned to the South to manage his father’s Macon, Georgia, billboard branch. Following his father’s suicide in March 1963, he became president and CEO of Turner Advertising Company at age 24, turning it into a global enterprise. He joined the Young Republicans, saying he “felt at ease among these budding conservatives” and was following his father’s far-right leanings, according to the book *It Ain’t as Easy as It Looks*. During the Vietnam War era, his business thrived, holding “virtual monopolies in Savannah, Macon, Columbus, and Charleston” and becoming the “largest outdoor advertising company in the Southeast.” The same book noted that Turner discovered his father had sheltered taxable income by lending it back to the company, and that the billboard business was a highly profitable, tax-depreciable revenue stream that generated large cash flows with little capital investment. In the late 1960s, he bought several Southern radio stations, then sold them in 1969 to purchase struggling Atlanta UHF station WJRJ-TV. At the time, UHF stations only succeeded in markets without VHF stations or with just one VHF outlet, and independent UHF stations were unprofitable even in larger markets. Turner believed this would change as viewers wanted more choices. He changed the call sign to WTCG, representing Turner Communications Group, and promoted it with the slogan “Watch This Channel Grow.” The station initially aired old movies from prior decades.