Ted Turner, the media mogul and philanthropist who founded CNN, a pioneering 24-hour network that revolutionized television news, died Wednesday surrounded by his family, according to a statement from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.
The Atlanta, Ohio-born businessman, nicknamed "The Mouth of the South" for his straightforward nature, built a media empire that included the first cable superstation and popular movie and cartoon channels, as well as professional sports teams like the Atlanta Braves, reports CNN.
Turner was also an internationally renowned yachtsman; a philanthropist who founded the United Nations Foundation; an activist who sought the global elimination of nuclear weapons; and a conservationist who became one of the largest landowners in the United States. He played a key role in the reintroduction of bison to the American West. He even created the cartoon Captain Planet and the Planeteers to educate children about the environment.
But it was his bold vision to bring news from around the world in real time, around the clock, that truly made him famous – as his idea finally caught on. In 1991, Turner was named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine for “influencing the dynamics of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses to history.”
Turner later sold his networks to Time Warner and then retired from the business, but continued to express pride in CNN, calling it the "greatest achievement" of his life.
“Ted was an incredibly engaged and dedicated leader, fearless and always willing to follow his intuition and trust his own judgment,” said Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide. “He was and always will be the guiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.”
A little over a month before his 80th birthday in 2018, Turner discovered he was suffering from Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. In early 2025, he was hospitalized with a mild case of pneumonia, before recovering at a rehabilitation center.
Turner is survived by five children, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The start of a revolution in television news
Turner began his media career at the age of 24, when he took over his father's advertising company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, after his father committed suicide. He coped with the shock and grief by immersing himself in work — but he wasn't content to promote other people's products forever.
He bought radio stations, then expanded into television in 1970 by purchasing a struggling station in Atlanta known as Channel 17. He tried to grow audiences by airing old sitcoms and classic movies, and at one point even hosted the Academy Award Theater himself.
Turner was not initially interested in news. He decided to invest in sports, securing the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball games. Viewers and advertisers flocked to the channel, and as Turner began to make money, he began to think bigger about television.
In 1976, he sent Channel 17's signal to satellite and it became the first cable superstation, reaching subscribers across the country.
Turner bought the Braves and then the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, partly to secure long-term broadcasting rights and partly because it was fun.
While building Superstation WTBS, he aimed even higher – a 24-hour news channel.
Turner was critical of traditional television and the way news was selected. He believed that one of the reasons America had so many problems was because people were not sufficiently informed. He saw television as the best tool to promote a diversity of opinions and believed that a news channel could even help save the world.
Many people thought his idea was crazy. But he saw a huge opportunity.
“I would work until 7 o’clock and when I got home, the news had ended,” he once said. “So I would completely miss the television news. And I thought there were a lot of people like me.”
Turner wanted to significantly expand the range of television news, imagining programs on business, health, sports and other topics. He admitted that he knew almost nothing about journalism, but he recruited the right people, like Reese Schonfeld.
On June 1, 1980, CNN – the first 24-hour news channel – began broadcasting and still continues today.
Turner expanded quickly, adding a second 24-hour news network CNN2 (later Headline News, then HLN) in 1982 and CNN International in 1985. It later added other channels such as Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies, and Cartoon Network.
In the mid-1980s, he purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's library of over 4,000 films and caused controversy by colorizing many black-and-white films, including Casablanca.
Of all his networks, CNN was always his "baby," but its early years were plagued by technical problems during long live broadcasts. Some critics derided it as "Chicken Noodle News."
However, Turner and his collaborators knew they were creating something revolutionary.
“I lived in my office for 20 years,” Turner said. His office was inside CNN’s broadcast building in Atlanta. “I lived on a couch for the first 10 years.”
Employees remember that he would enter the newsroom in a swimsuit.
“He was one of us,” recalls Tom Johnson.
When the Persian Gulf War broke out in 1990, the importance of a 24-hour news channel became clear. It was the first time a war had been broadcast live – and only on CNN.
“What Ted made possible was as important as the internet revolution,” said Terry McGuirk.
Turner was considered a visionary and won the title of "Man of the Year" in 1991.
In 1996, he sold his networks to Time Warner for about $7.5 billion and remained vice chairman of the company.
Shaped by family tragedies
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19, 1938. At the age of 4, shortly after his sister was born, his parents sent him to a boarding school, which he did not like.
“I wanted to be home,” he said.
Turner had a difficult relationship with his father, who had a weakness for alcohol and disciplined his son with a leather belt or a wire coat hanger.
“It wasn’t dangerous or anything like that,” Turner once recalled. “It just hurt a lot.”
The family later moved to Savannah, Georgia, and his sister Mary Jean was stricken with a rare form of lupus when she was 12. The disease caused brain damage and severe pain for years, until her death.
“She was sick for five years before she passed away. And it seemed so unfair, because she hadn’t done anything wrong,” Turner said. “What had she done wrong? And I couldn’t get any answers. Christianity couldn’t give me any answers for that. So my faith was kind of shaken.”
Turner was sent to several rigorous military schools in the South, and his father hoped he would be accepted to Harvard. He attended another Ivy League university – Brown University – but his father cut off his tuition because he disagreed with his chosen major, as he made clear in a letter to his son.
“My dear son, I am appalled, even shocked, that you have chosen the Classics as your branch of study,” wrote the elder Turner. “I am a practical man, and I cannot for any reason understand why you should want to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek?
"I think you're quickly becoming a fool, and the sooner you get out of that filthy environment, the better it will be for me."
Soon the money ran out and he dropped out of college, returning to Georgia to work for his father's billboard advertising company in Macon.
Turner was just 24 when his father shot himself to death in the upstairs bathroom of the family home near Savannah. It was March 5, 1963, and the elder Turner was under the influence of alcohol and drugs, struggling with depression and worried that he had taken too much risk with a $4 million acquisition that had expanded his company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, into the largest billboard company in the South.
“He went against everything I had taught me: 'Be brave and don't give up,'” Turner said.
Ted meets Jane
At the height of his career, Ted Turner – twice divorced and with five grown children – began dating actress Jane Fonda in 1989. The two married in 1991 and became one of the country's most famous couples.
“They didn’t get along at first,” recalled friend and former President Jimmy Carter. “They didn’t even like each other. I heard that from both of them. It was months before they decided to try again. And it turned into one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever known.”
Ted and Jane were together for 10 years, and when they broke up, his anger over her conversion to Christianity was blamed, but the truth was more complex. She simply could no longer stand in the shadow of his large personality or cope with his need for her constant presence as they traveled between his 28 properties. She was approaching 60 and no longer interested in living out of a suitcase.
“I will never love anyone the way I love him,” she said. “But I couldn’t keep moving around in his world, on the surface, for the rest of my life. I knew I would reach the end of my life and regret not doing the things I needed to do for myself.”
He was devastated when she left him, and as his marriage ended, his media empire began to slide. Time Warner had agreed to be acquired by Internet provider AOL in 2000, in the hope that the merger would help the traditional media company survive and thrive during the dot-com boom.
But the Internet bubble burst in 2001, and the following year AOL-Time Warner posted a record $99 billion loss, leading to massive job cuts. It quickly became considered the biggest failure in the history of corporate mergers and acquisitions.
Turner resigned as vice chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003 and three years later announced that he would not seek re-election to the board of directors.
He lost control of Turner Broadcasting, CNN, the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks – and his fortune, consisting mostly of stocks, was rapidly dwindling – more than $7 billion in three years.
“I lost Jane. I lost my job here. I lost my fortune, most of it. I have a billion or two left. You can live on that if you save,” he told CNN in May 2012. He said he was “heartbroken.” He tried to win her back, but it was clear the relationship was beyond repair. “We were so far apart philosophically, we couldn’t do it.”
Despite the split, Fonda and Turner always maintained a close friendship, speaking regularly on the phone and participating in each other's charitable activities.
“Just because people get divorced doesn't mean they stop loving each other,” she said. “It can be hard for two people to live together, but I can never forget the reasons that made me fall in love with him.”
Turner explained that he had “loved a lot of people,” but had only been “in love” twice — once with Fonda and once with someone he didn’t name. Being “in love” implies permanence, he said — something he hadn’t experienced in all his relationships.
A media mogul turned philanthropist
Turner always had a philanthropic bent, but it came to the fore in 1997, a year after he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner. At that time, he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations. Fulfilling that pledge took longer than he had anticipated — he made the final payment in 2015 — because of the hit to his fortune after the merger with AOL in 2001.
When it was all over, he was still a billionaire, but barely.
Turner did nothing small, including reinventing himself. He was the second-largest landowner in North America, with 2 million acres spread across 28 properties, including 19 ranches in Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota, as well as Argentina. The first restaurant, Ted's Montana Grill, opened in 2002, and now has more than 40 in 16 states. He managed to bring bison back from the brink of extinction; he had the largest private bison herd in the world, with an estimated 51,000 head.
His five children – Rhett Turner, Laura Turner Seydel, Jennie Turner Garlington, Teddy Turner and Beau Turner – serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. His other foundations include the United Nations Foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Captain Planet Foundation and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.
Half a century ago, his father's suicide left him with a $1 million advertising company. He often said that his father, who was 54 when he died, had left him with no goals to achieve. As a result, Turner was driven forward—always on the move, never looking back.
However, no matter how successful he became, Turner often still struggled to prove himself.
Fonda recalled crying when Turner told her about his childhood on their second date. They were driving to his 60,000-acre ranch in Montana, and he was talking as he drove. Tears streamed down his face.
“He couldn’t understand why I was crying when he told me stories about what his father had done to him,” she said. “Children can’t blame their parents. ‘It’s always my fault; it’s for my own good. I must not be good enough.’”
“Considering his childhood,” Fonda said, “he should have become a dictator. He should have become a bad person. The miracle is that he became what he is. A man who will go to heaven and there will be many animals there to welcome him, animals that have been saved from extinction thanks to Ted. He turned out to be a good man. And he says he is not religious. But the whole time I was with him, every speech – and he loves to give speeches – he always ends with ‘God bless you.’ And he will go to heaven. He is a miracle.”
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