Ted Turner, the brash and outspoken television pioneer who created a media empire and transformed the news business by creating CNN and introducing the 24-hour cable news cycle, died Wednesday. He was 87.
He died surrounded by his family, according to Turner Enterprises, the company that oversees his vast businesses and investments.
Turner was the force behind Cartoon Network, TNT and Turner Classic Movies. But his interests expanded far beyond media — owning professional sports teams in Atlanta and huge chunks of the American West, fueling conservation efforts through habitat restoration and endangered species work.
He donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities and raced yachts too, winning the America’s Cup in 1977.
Turner married actor Jane Fonda in 1991, when he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. By then, he was a celebrity in his own right, earning the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy body dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
U.S. President Donald Trump, reacting to Turner’s death, called him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
“Whenever I needed him, he was there, always willing to fight for a good cause!” Trump posted on social media.
Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time when news is instantly available, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.
In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked late after the network newscasts had gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own news.
He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
CNN’s breakthrough came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad. CNN stayed, capturing images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
“His first love was family and he had five children. But very close behind, he’s always told me that his greatest achievement was CNN, but he had so many over the years,” Tom Johnson, CNN’s president from 1990 to 2001, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
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Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Turner once compared Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, but the bitter rivals later reconciled over their concern for the environment.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav called Turner a visionary and a trailblazer.
“Ted’s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,” Zaslav said in a note to employees Wednesday.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a female student into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work for his father’s billboard company.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.
TBS’ collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves, which slowly attracted fans across the nation and declared themselves “America’s team.”
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually launched the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to appeal to a younger audience.
TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda once said of her relationship with Turner.
He struck up friendships with world leaders, bonding with Cuban leader Fidel Castro over hunting and arguments about politics.
Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the perennial doormats into champions in the 1990s. Their former stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field.
He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill.
Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.8 billion at the time of his death.
He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the 1977 America’s Cup title, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologizing.
He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.
Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Turner grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his 1997 pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured millions into nonprofits, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.
Bauder, a longtime media writer, retired from The Associated Press in 2026. Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima and AP writers John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, R.J. Rico in Atlanta and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed.
