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Ted Turner inherited a billboard company at 24 after his dad killed himself. By the time he died Wednesday at 87, he had founded CNN, built the world's largest bison herd, and handed the United Nations a billion dollars after thinking about it for 48 hours.
In September 1997, at a UN dinner in New York, Turner walked to the podium and pledged the billion with no warning. It was one of the biggest charity gifts ever made. The US had fallen behind on its UN dues. The agency was running on fumes. The Foundation he created has since turned that gift into more than $2 billion for global programs.
CNN almost died in the crib. It launched June 1, 1980 with 1.7 million subscribers, far short of what it needed to break even. Within months, costs doubled and revenues halved. Turner took new loans at 18% interest. The three big networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) called it the "Chicken Noodle Network" and waited for it to fail.
Then the 1991 Gulf War broke out. Bombs started falling on Baghdad on January 17, but other networks lost their feeds within hours. CNN's three had a phone line that held up. They kept broadcasting from a hotel as bombs fell. Turner's instruction to his news chief on the war budget had been four words: "spend whatever it takes." For weeks, CNN was the only network showing the war live. State TV around the world dropped its coverage and rebroadcast CNN's feed. Over a billion people watched. Even the Pentagon got its updates from CNN.
CNN was just the start. Turner bought the Atlanta Braves in 1976, put them on his superstation, and beamed baseball into nearly every home in North America years before they became good. The Braves won the World Series in 1995. He won the America's Cup, sailing's biggest trophy, in 1977. He bought MGM in 1986 for $1.5 billion, mostly for the film library that became Turner Classic Movies. He launched TNT and Cartoon Network. He commissioned Captain Planet, a cartoon about superhero environmentalists, to teach kids about pollution.
Turner started buying ranches in 1987 and never stopped. He ended up with about 2 million acres, more than three times the size of Rhode Island. The bison herd grew to 51,000 head, the largest privately owned anywhere in the world. He started Ted's Montana Grill, a chain serving bison burgers, so the herds could pay for themselves.
He sold his media empire to Time Warner in 1996 for $7.5 billion. The 2001 Time Warner-AOL merger then wiped out about $8 billion of his fortune in 30 months. By his own math, that's a $10 million loss every day for two and a half years.
TIME named him Man of the Year in 1991. He once said: "If only I had a little humility, I'd be perfect."
Dexerto@Dexerto
Ted Turner, the founder of CNN and Cartoon Network, has died at age 87
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