Ted Turner, the media visionary who forever altered the news business by founding CNN and helped introduce Americans to pay TV by creating cable channels like TNT, Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network, has died. He was 87.
Turner, who later turned his attention to saving the planet and pushing progressive political causes, died Wednesday, according to a statement from the family released by Turner Enterprises. Turner died peacefully surrounded by his family. He battled Lewy body dementia in recent years.
Turner wrote his own version of the Ten Commandments he called “11 Voluntary Initiatives,” a copy of which he carried on a printed card kept in his wallet; famously donated $1 billion to the United Nations; and spent several years as the largest shareholder of Time Warner, where he was nevertheless fired as vice chairman shortly after the conglomerate’s ill-fated merger with AOL.
He also was married to two-time Oscar-winning actressJane Fondafor a decade.
A former owner of baseball’s Atlanta Braves and an expert yachtsman in his younger days, Turner won the America’s Cup in 1977, then appeared drunk at the resulting news conference, an embarrassing moment that caused him to cut back on his alcohol consumption before he quit entirely in 2011.
Hetold Stephen Galloway ofThe Hollywood Reportera year later that he was rarely depressed, even though he had contemplated suicide and was once wrongly diagnosed as a manic depressive. He did suffer from “a mild to moderate case of anxiety” but boasted of an IQ of 128 — “in the 97th percentile,” he noted.
During the same interview, Turner said he was no longer interested in the media business but was passionate about his 2 million acres of property. The environmentalist, in fact, was racking up hundreds of thousands of miles a year on his private jet, visiting his 14 ranches that were home to 55,000 bison.
The charismatic Turner was the nation’s second biggest land owner after Liberty Media chairman John Malone, and his fortune was estimated at $2 billion, down from a high of about $11 billion at the height of the Internet bubble, when AOL used its overpriced stock to acquire Time Warner at the turn of the century.
He said at the time that the merger that created the now-defunct AOL Time Warner was “better than sex,” words he’d soon regret.
Often described as a loose cannon, Turner was nicknamed “Mouth of the South” and “Captain Outrageous” as he often courted controversy, once comparing fellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch to Adolf Hitler and challenging him to a pay-per-view boxing match.
Source: Drudge Report
