Ted Turner built CNN and gave a billion to the UN Foundation
Robert Edward Turner III (1938–2026) founded CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network, and WTBS, a pioneering superstation. After his father’s 1963 suicide he took over a $1 million billboard firm, bought Atlanta television, then scaled into global news. He later pledged $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation.
Born in Cincinnati, Turner moved to Savannah at nine and attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga. At Brown University he captained the sailing team and chose classics, which his father said made him almost vomit; he switched to economics but was expelled for having a woman in his dorm room, receiving an honorary degree in 1989. He served in the Coast Guard Reserve, joking later that he liked boats. At 24 he became head of the family billboard company and turned it into the largest outdoor advertiser in the Southeast.
In 1969 he traded his radio holdings for a floundering Atlanta UHF outlet on channel 17, betting that viewers would want more choices. Renamed WTCG, it filled airtime with cheap reruns like Gilligan's Island and Star Trek and a 3 a.m. newscast. He bought the Braves in 1976 and the Hawks in 1977 partly to fill the schedule, once suggesting pitcher Andy Messersmith, number 17, change his name to Channel. On 17 December 1976 satellite transmission turned the station into a national superstation, and in 1978 he paid an MIT student radio station 50,000 dollars for the WTBS call letters.
To fund CNN he sold his Charlotte station in 1979 for 20 million dollars, a record for UHF, and hired Reese Schonfeld, who said a 300-person all-electronic newsroom could do it. The network launched on 1 June 1980; Turner vowed to stay on the air until the end of the world and had a band record Nearer, My God, to Thee for that final broadcast.
His Braves won the 1995 World Series, and he started the Goodwill Games in 1986 to ease Cold War tensions. Nicknamed the Mouth of the South, he was the largest private US landowner until 2011, raised the world's biggest private bison herd for Ted's Montana Grill, and created Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
Source: Ted Turner
