Ted Turner, CNN founder, has died

 Ted Turner, CNN founder, has died

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Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, creator of the 24-hour news cycle, and Braves fan before they were good, died yesterday at 87. Turner earned the nickname “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South” while building one of the largest cable TV empires in the country. Outside of work, he was known as a sailor, conservationist, and, briefly, Jane Fonda’s husband. At age 24, Turner took over his family’s Atlanta billboard business following his father’s suicide, and ultimately turned it into a media powerhouse and himself into a billionaire: Turner bought local radio stations and a struggling Atlanta TV station, and by 1976, jumped on satellite technology to broadcast around the country. In 1980, Turner introduced CNN and the idea of around-the-clock news. Over the next few decades, he snapped up movie and TV libraries and turned them into channels like Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network. In 1996, Turner merged his massive portfolio with Time Warner in an ~$8 billion deal. Turner remained in the executive suite until 2003, when he was pushed out of the company following a disastrous $156.1 billion merger between Time Warner and AOL in 2000. When the dot-com bubble burst, Turner lost a huge chunk of his fortune. But he didn’t seem to harbor much bitterness, telling Charlie Rose in a 2008 interview, “Hardly anybody wins all the time. I’ve won more than most.” Plus, he had plenty of extracurriculars Turner, a conservationist, owned an estimated 2 million acres of land across eight states, making him one of the largest individual landowners in the US. He also owned the Atlanta Braves, helping the team become champions in the 1990s and being the last team owner to step in as manager before the league banned it. He was married three times, was a four-time Yachtsman of the Year recipient, went duck hunting with Fidel Castro, and donated $1 billion to the United Nations. Breaking news…once the leader of cable news, CNN is currently set to be rocked by the highly protested $111 billion takeover of its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance.