Ted Turner: Another giant sleeps
May 6, 2026
In the early to mid 20th Century, there were the movie moguls; Mayer, Zukor, the Warners, Zanuck, Goldwyn, Fox. In the mid-late 20th Century came the media moguls: Murdoch, Berlusconi, Redstone, Maxwell, Turner.
All of them were big in business but all of them were also characters about whom their studios could have made scarcely believable biopics. Now Ted Turner has died – aged 87 – leaving only the super mogul, Rupert Murdoch, still among us (does he actually have superpowers?).
Today’s tech bro billionaires have more money and more power, but their biopics would be bottom of the barrel B movies. I’ve sat through many streaming product launches and my mind has drifted fondly back to a day at MIP when Turner, Robert Maxwell and Silvio Berlusconi glad-handed the press and joshed along as they announced some new alliance or other. These were characters with a capital C. Okay… bad characters with a capital B in a couple of cases.
Not so Turner. Some of those tech bros started off with a bullshit slogan of “do no harm”. But that could have actually rung true with T.T. Sure, he could swash and buckle with the best of them, but he was driven by wanting to achieve something beyond money. He was also driven by his demons.
CNN will always be his abiding memorial, even though he’d won the America’s Cup years before he thought of it. He’d already figured out he could invent channels outside the networks by delivering cassette tapes to be played out simultaneously at cable headends. When satellite meant those headends could be reached simultaneously CNN followed.
I remember my then boss, founder of Cable & Satellite Europe Colin McGhee, flew to Atlanta and camped in his outer office for days to secure an interview. They then spent hours together, not least as they recognised the troublemaker in each other. Months later we all gathered around the TV set in our Kings Road office as CNN brought live coverage of the story that would, tragically, transform them; the launch of Challenger.
Beyond CNN and cartoons, Turner’s fortunes were mixed: a failed ownership of MGM but then great success with mini majors Castle Rock and New Line. Eventually he sold up to Time Warner to concentrate on his environmental campaigning and personal life, which included a marriage to Jane Fonda.
Turner’s start came when his father’s suicide left him in charge of a small southern billboard company. In later years he was open about his own struggles with depression and bi-polar disorder. RIP.
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