{"id":210037,"date":"2026-05-07T18:14:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T18:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/ted-turner-billionaire-media-mogul-and-cnn-founder-dies-at-87-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T18:14:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T18:14:52","slug":"ted-turner-billionaire-media-mogul-and-cnn-founder-dies-at-87-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/ted-turner-billionaire-media-mogul-and-cnn-founder-dies-at-87-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Ted Turner, billionaire media mogul and CNN founder, dies at 87 – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

news Alerts
There are no new alerts at this time
Ted Turner, the high-flying media tycoon, entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded CNN and revolutionized American cable television, died on Wednesday, according to his private holding company.
Subscribe to read this story ad-free
Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.
He was 87.
\u201cTed was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgment,\u201d CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson said in a statement.<\/a> \u201cHe was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN.\u201d
In his prime, Turner was one of the kings of broadcasting, a brash but savvy visionary. He turned the Turner Broadcasting System into a behemoth, establishing the \u201csuperstation\u201d concept and launching channels such as TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies.
He transformed culture and politics with Cable News Network, the first 24-hour news channel in the country. CNN helped to fundamentally change the format and speed of TV news, laying the path for competitors such as Fox News and MSNBC, now known as MS Now.
Turner, with his wily grin and thin mustache, jumped into other ventures with the zeal of an Old West prospector. He once owned the Atlanta Braves, marketing the baseball franchise as \u201cAmerica\u2019s Team.\u201d He created Ted\u2019s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that serves bison meat.
He was a staple of magazine covers and newspaper business sections, cultivating a reputation for keen instincts and a no-filter style. He sometimes ran into trouble for injudicious comments about world affairs or religion, earning the nickname \u201cCaptain Outrageous.\u201d<\/a>
\u201cI don\u2019t have any idea what I\u2019m going to say. I say what comes to my mind,\u201d he told The New Yorker for a profile published in 2001<\/a>.
He was also a prolific philanthropist, environmentalist and self-described \u201cdo-gooder.\u201d He famously gave $1 billion to the United Nations and co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
In recent years, Turner withdrew from public life following a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati to Robert Edward\u00a0Turner Jr. and Florence Turner. Turner\u2019s father was a wealthy billboard advertising magnate who owned his own firm, Turner Advertising.
The young Turner enrolled at Brown University in 1956, but he was kicked out three years later, reportedly for having a woman in his dorm room. Turner then joined his father at the family business, headquartered in Atlanta, becoming general manager of a branch office in 1960.
The elder Turner, struggling with financial hardships and mental health issues, died by suicide in 1963; his son took over the advertising company, taking on the roles of president and CEO.
Turner Advertising was renamed Turner Communications with the acquisition of several radio stations. Turner branched out into other media, purchasing a beleaguered UHF television station in Atlanta, as well as the rights to old movies and sitcom reruns.
In the mid-1970s, Turner made one of the most consequential decisions of his career. He was one of the first media company owners to use satellite technology to broadcast his station to a national cable television viewing audience, widening his reach and boosting revenues.
Turner filled the \u201cSuper Station\u201d lineup with a combination of vintage Hollywood titles, throwback sitcoms and baseball games.
In 1979, the company rebranded once again, becoming Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and establishing itself as one of the key enterprises of the cable television revolution.
Turner leveraged his media success in sports, buying the Atlanta Braves in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks in 1977. The Braves won the World Series in 1995 under his ownership.
He was also highly influential in the world of professional wrestling, airing wrestling programming on the precursor to TBS as far back as the 1970s and famously purchasing Jim Crockett Promotions in 1988, which he rebranded as World Championship Wrestling.
WCW\u2019s head-to-head battle for ratings against the World Wrestling Federation kicked off the \u201cMonday Night Wars\u201d of the mid-\u201990s to early 2000s, a boom period for the industry, before the company was eventually sold in 2001 to WWF\u2019s Vince McMahon.
In the late 1970s, Turner came up with the idea for a 24-hour cable news channel \u2014 a significant shift in an era when the \u201cBig Three\u201d network news programs still reigned supreme and many viewers did not conceive of news consumption as a minute-to-minute activity.
CNN aired its first broadcast on June 1, 1980, anchored by the husband-and-wife duo of David Walker and Lois Hart.\u00a0
In the mid-1980s, as CNN emerged as a cornerstone of the cable lineup and a household name, Turner bought MGM\/UA Entertainment Co., which included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer\u2019s sprawling library of more than 4,000 movies.
He offended cinephiles and much of the Hollywood establishment with his plans to \u201ccolorize\u201d black-and-white films from the MGM library. In a 1989 article<\/a>, the Los Angeles Times called him \u201cThe Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.\u201d
The critic Roger Ebert wrote that Turner\u2019s airing of a colorized version of \u201cCasablanca\u201d was \u201cone of the saddest days in the history of the movies.\u201d\u00a0
\u201cIt is sad because it demonstrates that there is no movie that Turner will spare, no classic however great that is safe from the vulgarity of his computerized graffiti gangs,\u201d Ebert wrote<\/a>.
Turner eventually backed down, deciding the colorization process was not cost-efficient. He soon sold off MGM\/UA, but he retained ownership of the MGM movie library, which later formed the backbone of programming on Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, launched in 1994.
Turner married for a third and final time in 1991, partnering with the Oscar-winning actor and activist Jane Fonda.\u00a0
The union between an avatar of American capitalism and an outspoken progressive who railed against the status quo raised eyebrows, but the two were smitten from the start and bonded over their shared curiosity about the world.
\u201cIn his heart, Ted is not a wealthy, powerful, privileged person,\u201d Fonda told interviewers for \u201cJane Fonda in Five Acts,\u201d an HBO documentary released in 2018. \u201cHe\u2019s a little boy who likes to play, and who has wild brilliance, and that\u2019s what I was attracted to.\u201d
\u201cWe were both children of suicide, so we understood each other,\u201d Fonda added.
The couple, by all accounts, savored their years together, spending countless hours in nature \u2014 hiking, fly-fishing, horse riding and other \u201cadventures,\u201d Fonda said. But the marriage ultimately ran aground, and they divorced in 2001.
\u201cIt was very difficult,\u201d Turner told the HBO documentarians. \u201cI\u2019ve survived, and so has she, but I feel like I was happier when I was with her than subsequently.\u201d
In 1996, Time Warner Inc. acquired Turner Broadcasting System for $7.5 billion. Turner was named vice chairman of Time Warner and presided over the new company\u2019s cable TV brands.\u00a0
Time Warner then merged with the former Internet giant AOL in 2001, with Turner becoming vice chairman and senior adviser of the newly formed AOL Time Warner Inc. Two years later, he resigned as vice chairman<\/a>.
\u201cTed\u2019s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,\u201d Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav said in a message to staff members Wednesday. \u201cHe believed deeply in the power of ideas, in doing things differently and in building platforms that could inform, inspire and connect people around the world.
\u201cThat belief inspired generations of leaders, myself included. He did not just disrupt media. He transformed it,\u201d Zaslav added.
It was widely reported that Turner was forced out of AOL Time Warner, and his departure effectively marked the end of his reign as a media industry chief. But in recent decades, he remained productive as a philanthropist and environmentalist.
He donated a staggering $1 billion to the United Nations in 1998; the funds were used to create the United Nations Foundation, a charitable group that supports the goals of the U.N.\u00a0
He co-founded, with former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction and advocates for global nonproliferation.
He supported various conservation projects and environmental causes. He was also one of the top landowners in the U.S., and he used the extensive acreage under his care to promote sustainability and ecotourism.
He was particularly invested in growing the country\u2019s bison herd, and in 2002 he co-founded Ted\u2019s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that purportedly offered the \u201clargest bison menu\u201d on the planet.
In his later years, Turner made comments suggesting he was uncomfortable with the wave of corporate media consolidation he once symbolized.
\u201cIn the media, as in any industry, big corporations play a vital role, but so do small, emerging ones. When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas,\u201d he wrote in a 2004 essay for Washington Monthly<\/a>.
Turner published an autobiography, \u201cCall Me Ted,\u201d in 2008. Ten years later, he announced that he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia<\/a>.
\u201cIt\u2019s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer\u2019s. It\u2019s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer\u2019s is fatal,\u201d Turner told journalist Ted Koppel in the fall of 2018 from his Montana ranch.
Turner was married and divorced three times. He had five children \u2014 two from his first marriage, to Judy Gale Nye, and three from his second marriage, to Jane Shirley Smith.
Daniel Arkin is a senior reporter at NBC News.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeTed Turner, the high-flying media tycoon, entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded CNN and revolutionized American cable television, died on Wednesday, according to his private holding company.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.He was 87.\u201cTed was an intensely involved and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":210038,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-210037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}