CNN Founder Ted Turner Dies at 87
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Emily BurackWed, May 6, 2026 at 3:46 PM UTC
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CNN Founder Ted Turner Dies at 87Bettmann - Getty Images
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Ted Tuner, the founder of CNN and other cable channels, died Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Florida, at age 87. No cause of death was shared, but ahead of his 80th birthday, he revealed he had Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), “a degenerative disease that causes dementia and muscle failure,” per NPR.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” Mark Thompson, Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, said in a statement. “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world.”
An ambitious businessman and philanthropist, Turner is perhaps best remembered for revolutionizing cable news. “I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told Reader’s Digest in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”
Born Robert Edward Turner III in Cincinnati 1938, his father moved his family to the Georgia when he was young, and Ted went to McCallie School in Chattanooga, then onto Brown University. After graduation, he joined his father to work at the family business, Turner Outdoor Advertising. After his father died of suicide, he continued the advertising business, and bought a small Atlanta television station in 1970.
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While he was counseled against the purchase, “Turner didn’t listen,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2010. “He was Captain Courageous, the man with nerves of steel who went on to win the America’s Cup, take on the networks, marry a movie star, and become a billionaire. He dressed like a cowboy. He gave the impression of signing contracts without looking at them. He was a drinker, a yeller, a man of unstoppable urges and impulses, the embodiment of the entrepreneur as risk-taker. He bought the station, and so began one of the great broadcasting empires of the 20th century.” In 1976, he bought the Atlanta Braves, and broadcast them on his new channel, named WTCG.
Four years later, in June 1980, he launched CNN, “the first 24-hour all-news channel, basing it in Atlanta, pointedly far from the traditional news capitals of New York and Washington. Less than two years later, he began broadcasting CNN Headline News, with updates every half-hour,” per the Times. Eason Jordan, a former CNN chief news executive, told NPR, “To him it was just the most logical thing in the world and he couldn't understand why nobody else was doing it. So he was going to do it…He was a visionary, a trailblazer, a rabble-rouser, a do-gooder — and he thought there would be a market for it.”
In 1996, he sold CNN and Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner for $7.34 billion, a decision he later regretted. “I lost my fortune, most of it, got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economize,” he said in 2012. “You carry on. And I found other things to do.” Those “other things” included the Nuclear Threat Initiative; donating to the U.N. to aid refugees and children; philanthropy focused on conservation and anti-global warning; signing the “Giving Pledge”; maintaining over a million acres of ranch land and a herd of buffalo; and founding Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain.
“There’s a lot of people who are awash in money they don’t know what to do with,” Turner said in the late 90s. “It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know what to do with it. I have learned the more good that I did, the more money comes in. You have to learn to give. You’re not born as a giver. You’re born selfish.”
Turner was married three times; his last marriage was to Jane Fonda in 1991, they divorced in 2001. He is survived by his five children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
