Ted Turner biography
Ted Turner, byname of Robert Edward Turner III, (born November 19, 1938, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.), American broadcasting entrepreneur, philanthropist, sportsman, and environmentalist who based a media empire that included a number of tv channels that he created, notably CNN.
Turner grew up in an prosperous household; his father owned a profitable billboard-advertising firm. In 1956 Turner enrolled at Brown University however was expelled three years later, reportedly for having a lady in his dormitory room. Turner joined the household enterprise, which was primarily based in Atlanta, and have become the overall supervisor of one of many firm’s department places of work in 1960. Following his father’s suicide in 1963, Turner took over the ailing enterprise and restored it to profitability.
In 1970 Turner bought a financially troubled UHF tv station in Atlanta, and inside three years he made it one of many few actually worthwhile unbiased stations within the United States. In 1975 Turner’s firm was one of many first to make use of a brand new communications satellite tv for pc to broadcast his station (later renamed WTBS, or TBS, the Turner Broadcasting System) to a nationwide cable tv viewers, thereby significantly rising revenues. To mirror the enterprise’s shift from billboards, Turner renamed it Turner Communications Company, and in 1979 the enterprise turned often called Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. Turner went on to create two different extremely profitable and revolutionary cable tv networks: CNN (Cable News Network; 1980), the primary 24-hour information channel, and TNT (Turner Network Television; 1988). Through the Turner Broadcasting System, he additionally bought the Atlanta Braves main league baseball crew in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks skilled basketball crew in 1977. In 1986 he purchased the MGM/UA Entertainment Company, which included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s library of greater than 4,000 movies. Turner set off a storm of protest when he approved the “colourizing” of among the library’s black-and-white movement footage
The massive debt burden sustained from these purchases compelled Turner to virtually instantly dump not solely MGM/UA but in addition a share of the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., although he retained management of it. He additionally stored possession of the MGM film library, which included many Hollywood classics. In 1991 he married actress-activist Jane Fonda; they divorced in 2001.
Turner resumed the growth of his media empire within the Nineteen Nineties with the creation of the Cartoon Network (1992) and Turner Movie Classics (1994). He additionally oversaw the acquisition (1993) of two motion-picture manufacturing corporations, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment. In 1996 the media big Time Warner Inc. acquired the Turner Broadcasting System for $7.5 billion. As a part of the settlement, Turner turned a vice-chairman of Time Warner and headed all the merged firm’s cable tv networks. When Time Warner merged with Internet firm AOL in 2001, Turner turned vice-chairman and senior adviser of AOL Time Warner Inc. In 2003 he resigned as vice-chairman of that firm, and three years later Turner introduced that he wouldn't search reelection to its board of administrators.
Turner was a famous philanthropist and environmentalist. He donated some $1 billion to determine (1998) the United Nations Foundation, and he created (2001) the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which sought to forestall the usage of weapons of mass destruction. He offered in depth funding to conservation efforts by means of his Turner Foundation (created 1990). Turner was one of many largest landowners within the United States, and lots of of his ranches had been concerned in sustainability and ecotourism. He oversaw efforts to rebuild and promote the nation’s bison herd, and in 2002 he cofounded Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that reportedly had the world’s “largest bison menu.” He additionally cocreated and cowrote the animated kids’s collection Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–96), which centres on teenaged environmental activists.
In addition, Turner was an avid sportsman, particularly often called a yachtsman. He piloted Courageous to win the America’s Cup in 1977. He additionally based and sponsored the Goodwill Games (1986–2001), citing his hope of easing Cold War tensions by means of pleasant athletic competitors.
Turner was the recipient of quite a few honours, together with a Peabody Award in 1997. In 2006 he obtained the Bower Award for Business Leadership from the Franklin Institute—a premier science and expertise training and growth centre in Philadelphia. In April 2007 Junior Achievement—a nonprofit academic group that gives hands-on enterprise coaching applications to youths all through the world—inducted Turner into its U.S. Business Hall of Fame. In 2008 Turner launched his autobiography, Call Me Ted.
In 2018 Turner introduced that he had been identified with Lewy physique dementia.