Ted Turner-Gap Rating 4/10

At the age of nine, he moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia where his dad continued in the billboard industry. Turner graduated from the military-oriented McCallie School in Chattanooga Tennessee. While there, he had the nickname "Terrible Ted" and was not the normal boy in school. He was an amateur taxidermist and also grew grass in his room. This "strangeness" seems to have carried on, to an extent, in his later life, as evidenced by his wearing a Confederate officer’s uniform with the accompanying sword to corporate negotiations. It is interesting to note here that Ted once even challenged Rupert Murdoch to a televised boxing match in Las Vegas. While still a teenager, he went to Brown University, despite his father’s desire that he not go there. While there, he took up yachting and became a master debater, but never finished his degree. He was asked to leave Brown after he was found in his room with a woman.

In 1963, when Ted was only 24, suffered the loss of his dad when his father shot himself following the increasing debt his billboard business had fallen into. First, Ted planned to sell the company, but after the death of his dad, he decided to try and run the business himself. He bought it back even though, many people felt he, like his father, would fail too. It didn’t happen right away, but slowly, Ted started to rebuild his father’s legacy.

In 1970, he took over a struggling UHF channel in Atlanta, Channel 17. Out of the four major Atlanta based channels, it placed last. It was a bare-bones channel providing the community with only the minimal news required by the FCC. No original programming was produced, but instead, reruns of old shows and black and white movies were the fair of this station. In the space of just three years, Turner turned it into a company that made a profit and in 1975, his station was one of the first to gain a nationwide audience. This was TBS and it was based totally on old reruns and movies. Advertising revenue was boosted greatly as well.

Just a year later, Turner seemed to be in the savior business. He started in a totally new direction and bought the Atlanta Braves for $11 million, saving the team and possibly even Atlanta sports in general. One year later, he bought the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. When the National League owners approved Turner’s buy out of the Braves on January 14, 1976, he then handed the responsibility of managing the teams over to Stan Kasten. With Kasten’s leadership, the Braves have won a couple of times in the World Series.

Ted did suffer some failures though, in the TV business. Some notable failures were the hostile takeover attempt of CBS and the large sum of money he paid ($1.6 billion) for the MGM film library. But he has a resilience and has always picked himself back up and "recreated himself."

In 1980 he started what was to become one of the most comprehensive news organizations in the United States and possibly the world. It was this year that he formed CNN, a 24-hour news channel and the first national cable network. It started off very well, but was destined to fail. To prove CNN as a formidable competitor to existing news organizations, CNN attempted to carry Jimmy Carter’s press conference live while still making a scheduled report from the Middle East. It worked very well and CNN was the only news source that carried the press conference live.

Eight years later, Turner began another station, TNT (Turner Network Television). TNT is currently viewed in over 61 million homes across America.

In August, 1990, he also launched a network that stretched across the Southeast called SportSouth. The network provides coverage of Atlanta Braves baseball, Atanta Hawks and Charlotte hornets basketball, college football, auto racing, volleyball, golf, tennis and other major sporting events. This was a joint venture with Scripps Howard and Liberty Media and is available in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Kentucky. He eventually sold the network to FOX Sports, though.

In 1996, Turner finalized a foxy deal with Time Warner. Time Warner was given ownership of TBS and everything under it. On October 10, 1996, he became the Vice Chairman of Time Warner, Inc. Now he had control of everything he had control of before plus E! Entertainment and Comedy Central.

Ted Turner has made many donations to charitable organizations over the years. In 1994 alone he contributed $200 million to charitable organizations. His most notable, however, was his donation in September, 1997 of $1 billion dollars to a new foundation established to help support the United Nations. To put this in perspective, "all charitable giving by Americans in 1996 was approximately $120 billion." Turner has come under a lot of scrutiny because the large amount of money he gave. Also adding to the controversy was that Turner criticized other millionaires for not repaying their debt to society. In a 1996 New York Times interview he said, "All the money is in the hands of these few rich people and none of them give any money away. It’s dangerous for them and the country. We may have another French Revolution and ther’ll be another madame Defarge knitting and watching them come in little oxcarts down to the town square and BOOM! Off with their heads!" Ted believes that Forbes magazine’s richest Americans list is spoiling our country because the rich try to get richer just to get higher on Forbes’ list. When ABC's John Stossell suggested to Turner that he should stick to being an entrepreneur and that his donations probably wouldn’t go very far, Turner looked at Stossel like he was crazy. Turner, himself, said that his father would help "less affluent students, he would pay their way to college. They wouldn’t even know he did it. He did it quiet." So Ted seems to follow in his father’s footsteps. His foundation gives financial help to over 400 organizations.

The Goodwill Games were Ted’s brainchild as well. He thought that by starting the games, it would warm relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.

Ted Turner is the 26th wealthiest man in the U.S.A. (as of 1998) and his networks continue to play a major role in the television news and entertainment industries.

Despite that fact, Turner has been called some pretty brash names throughout the years; for instance: " ‘The mouth of the South’ and ‘Captain Outrageous’ for his notorious volubility and singular opinions." Not only has he been successful in the television/cable industry, though, but he has visualized the value of land and at present he owns various ranches within the U.S. making him the largest single landowner in America. This is interesting because his grandfather lost his own farm during the Depression and the family lived in poverty thereafter, well until Ted came along that is.