Ted Turner, Media Mogul and CNN Founder, Dies at 87
Ted Turner, Media Mogul and CNN Founder, Dies at 87
Jill MenzeWed, May 6, 2026 at 2:18 PM UTC
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Credit: Ben Rose/Getty
Ted Turner, the business magnate who founded CNN and Turner Broadcasting System, has died. He was 87.
Turner Enterprises announced the news, reporting the billionaire entrepreneur and noted environmentalist, who was previously married to actress Jane Fonda, died on Wednesday, May 6.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” CNN CEO Mark Thompson 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.”
Born Robert Edward Turner III on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Turner moved at the age of 9 to Savannah, Ga., where his father ran a billboard advertising company. Following his father's death in 1963, Turner took over the family business, Turner Advertising. In 1970, he entered the TV business through the acquisition of the struggling Atlanta-based station UHF.
Turner invented the "superstation" in 1975, which used a satellite to broadcast the TV channel that went on to become Turner Broadcasting System, or TBS. The following year, Turner continued to flex his business muscles by buying the Atlanta Braves so he could broadcast the Major League Baseball team's games on his station.
His most notable achievement was the creation of CNN, the first 24-hour news network, in 1980. The success of CNN — which counted an audience of 165 million households around the world going into the 21st century — saw Turner Broadcasting expanding into other businesses including CNN Headline News, CNN International, TNT, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies.
Ted Turner is honored with the Film Independent Humanitarian Award in 2014
Credit: Frazer Harrison/WireImage
Turner sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner in 1996 for $7.3 billion in stock (Time Warner would go on to buy AOL in 2001). He served as vice chairman of the company until 2003 and resigned from the board in 2006.
In addition to his business venture successes, Turner was also a recognized philanthropist and the chairman of the Turner Foundation, which he founded in 1990 to support environmental causes. That same year, he collaborated on the launch of the animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers to promote teen environmental activism.
He pledged to donate $1 billion to the United Nations in 1997, and the following year created the United Nations Foundation, which aims to promote a more just world. He then founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2001 to protect the globe from nuclear weapons.
His daughter Laura Turner Seydel called her father a "real-life Captain Planet" in an interview with PEOPLE in 2021. She followed in his footsteps with a series of organizations and initiatives aimed at benefiting the planet.
Captain Planet, Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner attend the Captain Planet Foundation's 2012 benefit gala in Atlanta
Credit: Ben Rose/Getty
Turner was also known as a yachtsman. He piloted his yacht Courageous to win the 1977 America's Cup and was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame in 1993.
He was the third-largest individual landowner in America, with more than 2 million acres of property, according to the 2025 Land Report 100. He owned 45,000 bison on 14 ranches in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico and South Dakota. He had three ranches in Argentina as well.
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The media mogul had three wives, all of whom he subsequently divorced: Judy Nye, from 1960 to 1964; Jane Shirley Smith, from 1965 to 1988; and Fonda, from 1991 to 2001.
In Fonda's 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, she said Turner swooped in as soon as he heard about her split from second husband Tom Hayden. "There were times when something would set us to laughing so hard we’d sink to the floor, like the night when our guffaws collapsed us at the foot of the Gone With the Wind staircase at his plantation and we had to crawl up to bed on hands and knees," she wrote.
But a month after their marriage, she found out Turner was cheating on her, and she turned to drinking to dull her frustration over Turner's restlessness, their stunted communication and constant travels.
Fonda also retired from acting following her nuptials with Turner. "I left for 15 years, when I married Ted Turner, and I did not think I was gonna come back, 'cause when I married him, I thought it'd be forever," Fonda told Entertainment Tonight in 2023.
Jane Fonda and Ted Turner on their wedding day
In September 2018, Turner revealed he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s. It’s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer’s is fatal,” Turner said of LBD, which is caused by abnormal protein deposits that build up over time and disrupt normal brain function.
“Thank goodness I don’t have that. But, I also have got, let’s — the one that’s — I can’t remember the name of it,” he said, pausing momentarily before adding, “Dementia. I can’t remember what my disease is.”
“Lewy Body dementia is the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Alex Pantelyat, Director of Atypical Parkinsonism Center and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins previously told PEOPLE in November 2015. “It is an incredibly devastating disease. It affects your core, it affects who you are as a person. In the case of DLB and some of these other related disorders it tends to a great extent affect the frontal lobe, which is really what makes us human. It’s really unbelievably devastating.”
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For his contributions to media during his lifetime, Turner was the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions. He was named TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1991 and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame the same year. Turner won a Peabody Award in 1997 and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Communication in 2000.
Turner is survived by his five children, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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