Ted Turner, the man who invented 24-hour cable news and reshaped how the entire world consumed information, died Wednesday at the age of 87. His private holding company, Turner Enterprises, confirmed the news. No cause of death was given, though Turner had been living with Lewy body dementia since at least 2018 and was hospitalized with pneumonia in early 2025.
If you’ve ever watched cable news, flipped to Cartoon Network, caught a Braves game on TBS, or stayed up way too late watching old movies on Turner Classic Movies, you’ve lived inside the world Ted Turner built. The man they called “The Mouth of the South” and “Captain Outrageous” earned both nicknames honestly. He was loud, brash, wildly ambitious, and almost always right about where the media business was heading next.
From Billboards to a Media Empire
Turner’s story starts with tragedy. His father, Ed Turner, built a successful billboard advertising company in the South but died by suicide in March 1963. Ted was just 24 years old. Overnight, he became president and CEO of Turner Advertising Company, running operations in Savannah, Macon, Columbus, and Charleston. The business held what amounted to virtual monopolies in those markets, and Turner used that cash flow to start buying radio stations across the South.
But radio wasn’t big enough for him. In 1970, Turner bought a struggling UHF television station in Atlanta, Channel 17. It was a money loser. Nobody wanted it. Turner changed the call sign to WTCG (Turner Communications Group) and filled the schedule with old movies, classic sitcoms, and theatrical cartoons. It wasn’t glamorous programming. But it was cheap and people watched it.
The real genius came in the mid-1970s when Turner figured out he could use satellite technology to beam his little Atlanta station into cable systems all over the country. That was the birth of the “superstation” concept. Suddenly, a local UHF channel was reaching 2 million cable subscribers nationwide. The station became TBS, and Turner Broadcasting System was off and running.
CNN Changed Everything
On June 1, 1980, CNN’s first broadcast reached 1.7 million cable television subscribers. The idea was simple but radical: a news channel that never went off the air. No sign-off at midnight. No test pattern. Just news, all the time, around the clock.
People thought he was out of his mind. The established broadcast networks viewed it as a joke. Turner staffed the channel with largely unknown on-air personalities and ran it on a shoestring budget. But the timing was perfect. Americans were shifting from broadcast TV to cable, and CNN gave them something no one else could: instant, live coverage of whatever was happening in the world, whenever it was happening.
The network built its reputation over the next decade, but what truly cemented CNN as a global force was the 1991 Gulf War. Reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett reported live from Baghdad as bombs fell around them. An estimated 1 billion people worldwide tuned in, making it the largest audience for a non-sporting or concert event in television history at that point. CNN International launched in 1985, and at its peak, Turner Broadcasting’s networks and services reached 2 billion people in 200 countries.
Tom Johnson, CNN’s former president, once asked Turner what the rules about news were. Turner’s answer was two words: “Be fair.” Johnson pushed for more. Turner said, “That’s it.”
CNN also covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student uprising at Tiananmen Square, and the September 11 attacks. Turner himself watched 9/11 unfold from his Atlanta office as reporters rushed past him in the hallway.
The Doomsday Video and Other Turner Legends
One of the strangest pieces of Turner lore is the so-called Doomsday Video. Before CNN even launched, Turner created a short recording that was supposed to air only if the world were literally ending. It became one of the most unusual artifacts in media history. The video sat in CNN’s archives for decades, a reminder that Turner always thought on a scale most people couldn’t fathom.
Turner was also an accomplished sailor, not just a weekend hobbyist. In 1977, his yacht Courageous defeated the Australian challenger in a four-race sweep to win the America’s Cup. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated that year and was later inducted into both the America’s Cup Hall of Fame and the National Sailing Hall of Fame. He’d honed his skills at the Savannah Yacht Club as a young man and even competed in Olympic sailing trials.
Sports, Movies, and Building an Empire
Turner didn’t just watch sports. He owned them. In 1976, he bought the Atlanta Braves, partly because he saw the team as an investment but also because he needed programming for his superstation. The Braves became one of the most popular baseball teams in the country during his era of ownership, appearing repeatedly in the World Series throughout the 1990s and early 2000s and winning the title in 1995. The following year, he acquired the Atlanta Hawks basketball team for the same reason: content.
In 1986, Turner pulled off one of his biggest deals, purchasing the film studio MGM/UA Entertainment Co. from Kirk Kerkorian for $1.5 billion. He eventually sold the studio name back but kept the massive film library. That library of thousands of classic movies became the backbone of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which launched in 1994, and also provided the material that fueled the Cartoon Network when it debuted in 1992. He also created TNT (Turner Network Television) and helped pioneer the idea of original programming on basic cable.
In 1986, he launched the Goodwill Games, an international athletic competition designed to bypass the Cold War boycotts that had plagued the Olympics. It was the kind of thing only Ted Turner would attempt.
The Sale He Always Regretted
In 1996, Turner sold CNN and the rest of Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner for about $7.34 billion. He was named vice chairman. It was a deal he deeply regretted for the rest of his life.
Things got worse. In 2000, Time Warner sold itself to AOL in what is widely considered one of the worst mergers in American corporate history. Turner opposed the deal but couldn’t stop it. He became vice chairman and senior adviser of the combined company but resigned two years later. The man who had built an empire from a single struggling TV station watched it get swallowed up by corporate machinery that didn’t share his instincts.
A Billion Dollars for the United Nations
Turner’s second act was philanthropy, and he attacked it with the same intensity he brought to media. In September 1997, while being honored by the United Nations, he pledged $1 billion to the organization. It was an almost unheard-of sum for an individual donor at the time. That gift created the United Nations Foundation, which has supported the institution ever since.
That donation helped usher in an era of mega-philanthropy. Within a few years, Bill and Melinda Gates pledged $5 billion to their foundation, and Warren Buffett committed roughly $36 billion to the Gates Foundation in 2006. Since 2000, two dozen donors have made single gifts of $1 billion or more. Turner helped normalize the idea that billionaires should give away enormous sums while they were still alive, rather than waiting to leave it in a will. In 2010, he signed Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of his fortune.
He also co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with former Senator Sam Nunn, a bipartisan nonprofit focused on preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction. He launched the Turner Foundation in 1990, which has distributed about $400 million in grants. He co-created the Captain Planet Foundation and the animated TV show “Captain Planet and the Planeteers.” He co-founded Ted’s Montana Grill in 2002, a restaurant chain built around bison from his own ranches. He became one of the largest private landowners in the United States, managing more than two million acres across eight states.
Three Marriages and a Complicated Personal Life
Turner was married three times. His first marriage was to Judy Nye, from 1960 to 1964. His second was to Jane Shirley Smith, from 1965 to 1988. His third, and most famous, was to actress Jane Fonda in 1991. They divorced in 2001. Fonda later said she needed room for personal growth and that staying in the marriage would have kept her from becoming the person she wanted to be. Turner wrote in his memoir that Fonda’s conversion to Christianity created tension, though he said it wasn’t the only cause. Despite everything, the two stayed on friendly terms. Fonda often called him her “favorite ex-husband” and continued attending events with him. He has five children: Laura, Teddy, Rhett, Jennie, and Beau.
Turner described himself as having bipolar depression. In his 2008 memoir, “Call Me Ted,” Jane Fonda described a childhood marked by beatings and psychological manipulation from his father. Turner attended Brown University, where he was vice president of the debating union and captain of the sailing team. He majored in classics, switched to economics, and was expelled before graduating. In 1989, Brown awarded him an honorary degree.
What He Left Behind
Turner was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1991. He was named Broadcasting and Cable’s Man of the Century in 1999. He received the Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy in 2016. Fellow media mogul John Malone once said of Turner, “It was as if God were on his side.”
CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson said: “Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgment. He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN.”
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said Turner “led a life as big as the American Dream he lived.”
In his memoir, Turner wrote that he often thought about what he’d want on his tombstone. At one point, he considered: “Here Lies Ted Turner. He Never Owned a Broadcast Network.” Later, he settled on something simpler: “I Have Nothing Left to Say.”
His father once told him: “Son, be sure to set goals so high you couldn’t possibly achieve them in one lifetime. That way you’ll always have something ahead of you.” Whatever you think of his legacy, Ted Turner listened.
The Turner family has requested privacy and said a private service is planned, with a public memorial to follow at a later date.
