Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.<\/p>\n
Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.<\/p>\n
Mr. Turner\u2019s signature creation was CNN \u2014 the Cable News Network \u2014 which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.<\/p>\n
As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment \u201csuperstation\u201d that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.<\/p>\n
In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio\u2019s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged<\/a> his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world\u2019s largest media companies.<\/p>\n Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America\u2019s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,\u201d he told the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader\u2019s Digest article in 1998. \u201cAnd that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.\u201d<\/p>\n Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch \u2014 who once had his New York Post run the headline \u201cIs Turner Insane?\u201d \u2014 had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.<\/p>\n An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.<\/p>\n Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.<\/p>\n His personal life, too, was turbulent. His three marriages \u2014 his last, ending in 2001, was to the Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda \u2014 were often rocked by his open displays of infidelity, heavy drinking and otherwise boorish behavior.<\/p>\n Nicknamed \u201cthe Mouth of the South\u201d for his self-aggrandizing claims and a reputation for dispensing gratuitous insults, Mr. Turner \u2014 tall and slim with a craggy, mustachioed face \u2014 could nonetheless be a man of great charm, whose gaffes were repeatedly forgiven by an indulgent public, which in large part considered him a living American legend.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner\u2019s politics were contradictory and controversial. While claiming to be an archconservative Republican with warm ties to Christian evangelicals and far-right John Birch Society members, he also befriended the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and defended the repressive conduct of the Communist Chinese government.<\/p>\n In an extraordinary act of philanthropy, he donated a billion dollars<\/a> to the United Nations, an organization loathed by American conservatives. He adored hunting, yet he became a darling of environmentalists by buying more than a million acres of wilderness and ranch land and then setting them aside as nature preserves. He became the fourth-largest private landowner<\/a> in the United States, with two million acres, in addition to vast tracts he owned in Argentina and other countries.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner\u2019s influence was most apparent in the way his CNN transformed television news by presenting it around the clock with constant updates, conveying a sense of immediacy.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, news is available when it actually happens, not when it\u2019s convenient for the three broadcast networks to carry it,\u201d the father-and-son authors Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg wrote in their 1995 biography, \u201cCitizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon.\u201d Whether covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crushing of the Chinese student movement in Tiananmen Square or the Persian Gulf war of 1991, Mr. Turner\u2019s CNN was the vehicle to view history in the making.<\/p>\n \u201cI learn more from CNN than I do from the C.I.A.,\u201d President George H.W. Bush was widely quoted as saying at the time of the war.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner himself professed not to be terribly interested in news or any other kind of business. It was the thrill of the hunt that drove him, not the quarry. As he told The New York Times, \u201cI\u2019ve always been more of an adventurer than a businessman.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Captain Courageous\u2019<\/p>\n Robert Edward Turner III \u2014 who was universally known as Ted \u2014 was born on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. His father, Robert Jr., a native Mississippian whose family had grown cotton, moved to Ohio during the Depression and married Florence Rooney, the daughter of a Cincinnati grocery chain owner.<\/p>\n The elder Mr. Turner, known as Ed, later moved the family back south, to Georgia, where he started a billboard advertising company. In interviews and biographies, Ted Turner described him as an abusive alcoholic whom he nevertheless admired and sought to please.<\/p>\n As a youth, Ted Turner attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., at the time an elite all-white military academy that emphasized conservative Christian values. During the summers, he worked for his father\u2019s company, painting billboards. His father made him use his wages to pay for his room and meals at home in Savannah.<\/p>\n Ted graduated in 1956 with good enough grades to gain entrance to Brown University. But he was no model student. A former classmate, William Kennedy, who went on to become a Brown University official, was quoted in \u201cCitizen Turner\u201d as describing young Ted as \u201ca bigot, as maybe all of us were in a sense at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Turner, he said, drank excessively, sang Nazi songs outside a Jewish fraternity house and put up Ku Klux Klan signs on the dormitory doors of Black students. He was finally tossed out of Brown after being caught in bed with a woman in his dorm room.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner then joined his father\u2019s company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which became the largest of its kind in the South, sometimes working hard but often devoting more energy to parties and to sailing, which would become a lifelong passion.<\/p>\n In 1963, his 53-year-old father, after incurring steep debts to expand his billboard operations and struggling with alcohol and drug abuse and depression, shot himself to death in an upstairs bathroom at the Turner home outside Savannah.<\/p>\n Ted Turner, then 24, was devastated and left feeling \u201calone,\u201d he told Time magazine, \u201cbecause I had counted on him to make the judgment on whether or not I was a success.\u201d In addition, he was still mourning the recent death of his younger sister, Mary Jean, from the autoimmune disease lupus and encephalitis. He described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith, but also as what galvanized him to become a \u201csuperachiever\u201d in business.<\/p>\n Spurning the counsel of his father\u2019s friends and accountants to sell off the business, he insisted on running it intact.<\/p>\n His ambition did not end with billboards, however. In 1970, he went into debt to buy a small, failing Atlanta television station, which he renamed WTCG, for Turner Communications Group, the name he gave his father\u2019s company in the late \u201960s after he began buying radio stations. He figured he would use billboards to advertise his new television business. Lacking enough programming and drawing little advertising revenue, the station continued to hemorrhage red ink.<\/p>\n His business advisers counseled him against the purchase.<\/p>\n \u201cTurner didn\u2019t listen,\u201d Malcolm Gladwell wrote<\/a> in The New Yorker in 2010. \u201cHe was Captain Courageous, the man with nerves of steel who went on to win the America\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n An Explosive Expansion<\/p>\n Mr. Turner went further into debt in 1976 to buy the Atlanta Braves, then a dismal baseball team. The purchase price was $500,000 in cash and $8 million at 6 percent annual interest over 10 years. (Forty years later, the Braves franchise was worth $1.175 billion, according to Forbes.)<\/p>\n This time, his gamble paid off. By broadcasting all 162 Braves games on WTCG, he was able to fill a huge programming void for a pittance of what it would have cost to buy or produce other programs. Soon the station\u2019s cash flow was on the rise. (He also bought the Atlanta Hawks basketball franchise, in 1977.)<\/p>\n Rather than use the new money to pay down his debts, Mr. Turner took on more loans to expand his television business through satellite broadcasting. He faced hefty fees for the use of an RCA satellite and had to purchase expensive new broadcasting equipment.<\/p>\n This, too, was a winning gamble. He correctly surmised that he could use the satellite to beam his Atlanta station\u2019s signal and its substantial sports programming to cable systems throughout the country. In this way, what would become known as TBS \u2014 for Turner Broadcasting System, the new company name he adopted for the nation\u2019s first \u201csuperstation\u201d \u2014 was born in late 1976. In addition to sports, he featured a steady stream of old movies and reruns of \u201cLassie\u201d and \u201cI Love Lucy\u201d at relatively little cost.<\/p>\n At a time when the nascent cable industry needed to prove its programming value to subscribers, Mr. Turner\u2019s station was considered essential to cable\u2019s growth and expansion.<\/p>\n At the same time, Mr. Turner was developing a damaging reputation for philandering, drunkenness and public misconduct. His tumultuous first marriage, to Julia Nye (with whom he had two children, Laura and Teddy Jr.), ended in the early 1960s shortly after Mr. Turner competed against his wife in a yacht race. Seeing she was on the verge of winning, he rammed her boat with his.<\/p>\n Later, he publicly humiliated his second wife, Jane Smith, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant with whom he had two sons, Beauregard and Rhett, and a daughter, Jennie, by taking his girlfriends to Braves games.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner\u2019s antics extended to the office. If he were displeased with a presentation, he might hurl its written text across the room and loudly denigrate his employees, according to his biographers the Goldbergs. To win more business, he sometimes resorted to histrionics.<\/p>\n \u201cTurner would do anything to sell his station to advertisers,\u201d the authors wrote in \u201cCitizen Turner.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019d jump up on chairs, on desks, on tables, on anything that didn\u2019t move, and shout at the top of his larynx. If he met really serious resistance, he might even drop to the floor as if he\u2019d been shot and cry, \u2018You\u2019re killing me!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In 1977, he was barred from baseball for almost a year by the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn<\/a>, for tampering with another team\u2019s player, Gary Matthews, a free-agent outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, and for ignoring edicts by Mr. Kuhn. Mr. Turner responded, \u201cI\u2019m thankful he didn\u2019t have me shot.\u201d<\/p>\n During these years of anxious debt concerns and explosive business expansion, Mr. Turner spent months at a time sailing and winning yachting accolades. In 1970 and again in 1973, he was named Yachtsman of the Year by the United States Sailing Association, having learned to sail at his hometown Savannah Yacht Club, and he set his sights on winning the prestigious America\u2019s Cup.<\/p>\n He first had to overcome the initial objections of the tradition-bound New York Yacht Club. Membership in the club was required for any entrant in the America\u2019s Cup competition, and the club\u2019s officials were uneasy about Mr. Turner\u2019s rowdy reputation.<\/p>\n In the end, however, he was simply too good a yachtsman to reject, and the objections were dropped. He fared poorly in his America\u2019s Cup debut, in 1974, and subsequently purchased the yacht Courageous<\/a> from Ted Hood, who had proved victorious with it in 1974.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America\u2019s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races once he had been accepted. \u201cDuring the Cup eliminations,\u201d Time magazine reported, \u201che flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behavior and turned Newport\u2019s blue bloods positively purple.\u201d<\/p>\n The Cup organizers forced Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to one elite club, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting female members. \u201cI wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,\u201d Mr. Turner wrote to the club president.<\/p>\n But on winning the Cup, he surrounded himself with young, attractive women and was too drunk to finish a victory speech at a nationally televised news conference.<\/p>\n He continued to serve as skipper in major open-sea races, notably in the catastrophic 1979 Fastnet Race<\/a>, organized by the Royal Ocean Racing Club, in the Irish Sea. Unexpectedly fierce winds damaged and sank many boats, killing 15 sailors. Of about 300 starters, only 85 finished, and Mr. Turner\u2019s yacht, Tenacious, was named the winner.<\/p>\n \u201cLike any experience,\u201d Mr. Turner said<\/a> at the time, \u201cwhenever you come through it you feel better. We\u2019re not talking about the other people who died, but to be able to face it all and come through it is exhilarating. Sailing in rough weather is what the sport is all about.\u201d<\/p>\n The triumphs on water turned Mr. Turner into an American hero, and he used his new popularity to his business advantage. On June 1, 1980, he launched CNN<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n CNN Is Born<\/p>\n CNN struggled initially, losing up to $2 million a month in its first two years. When the network first went on the air, it had fewer than two million viewers, compared with the three big networks \u2014 CBS, NBC and ABC \u2014 whose news broadcasts collectively reached more than 50 million households. And Mr. Turner had to count on his audience\u2019s patience with his inexperienced, underpaid news staff and repeated technical problems that left anchors without copy or footage.<\/p>\n Competitors derided CNN as the \u201cChicken Noodle Network,\u201d and Mr. Turner\u2019s network had to sue the Reagan administration and the three rival networks to gain inclusion in the White House press pool.<\/p>\n The need to fill 24 hours of coverage was daunting. Mr. Turner and his top executives went on a hiring binge, recruiting pundits such as Robert Novak<\/a> and finding anchors and hosts like Lou Dobbs<\/a> and Larry King<\/a> from local TV stations and the world of radio, respectively. They built from scratch a sprawling international framework for the newsroom\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n Ahead of the ground operations in the Persian Gulf War, CNN found itself with a major advantage. The network\u2019s correspondent Peter Arnett<\/a> was among the only Western reporters in Baghdad, providing robust on-the-ground reporting from the city under attack from U.S. forces. By contrast, competitors were outside the country, and their dispatches were far more dependent on official U.S. government statements.<\/p>\n CNN\u2019s coverage from Iraq brought it a prestigious Peabody Award<\/a>, which noted that it had \u201cmatured from a cable curiosity to become an international service of inestimable importance.\u201d Mr. Turner appeared on Time magazine\u2019s cover<\/a> as \u201cMan of the Year\u201d<\/a> for 1991.<\/p>\n As CNN was building respectability, Mr. Turner was able to draw public sympathy in his efforts to portray himself as a patriotic underdog in the battle against the network giants for larger audiences. Claiming to represent conservative family values, he attacked the networks\u2019 senior executives as a \u201cbunch of pinkos.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the race for ratings, their newscasts dig up the most sordid things human beings do,\u201d Mr. Turner told Newsweek in 1980. \u201cThey make heroes of criminals and glamorize violence. They\u2019ve polluted our minds and our children\u2019s minds.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Turner could stake out political positions far to the left of the major networks when it suited him, however. In 1982, for example, he returned from a visit to Cuba full of praise for Mr. Castro. When CNN executives upbraided him for declaring the Cuban leader \u201ca great guy,\u201d Mr. Turner was reported to have retorted: \u201cCastro\u2019s not a Communist. He\u2019s like me, a dictator.\u201d He even persuaded Mr. Castro to film a promotional ad for CNN.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, in his battle against the networks, Mr. Turner counted among his allies prominent members of the John Birch Society and right-wing Christian evangelical ministers like the Rev. Jerry Falwell<\/a> and the Rev. Donald Wildmon<\/a>. They overlooked Mr. Turner\u2019s bawdy lifestyle while applauding his calls for more family values in broadcasting.<\/p>\n Cable station operators saw the strident Mr. Turner as their champion against the networks, and signed up to receive his CNN and TBS superstation.<\/p>\n With CNN starting to be profitable and TBS earning a windfall, Mr. Turner was ready to roll the dice once again. In 1985, he announced a hostile bid for CBS, then the largest television network, for $5.4 billion in stock and junk bonds. The proposed deal shocked the media industry because Mr. Turner was proposing to have his company, TBS, with annual revenue of less than $300 million, take over a giant conglomerate with revenue of almost $5 billion.<\/p>\n CBS counterattacked by adopting a so-called poison pill, borrowing a billion dollars to buy back 21 percent of its stock. In effect, CBS was warning Mr. Turner that if his takeover bid were to succeed, he would be saddled with an impossibly large debt. Admitting defeat, he withdrew his bid in July 1985.<\/p>\n A month later, Mr. Turner was back in the headlines with an agreement to buy the Hollywood film company MGM-UA Entertainment \u2014 itself a recent merger of MGM and United Artists \u2014 from the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian<\/a> for $1.5 billion. Under the terms of the deal, which was completed in March 1986, Mr. Turner took over the MGM studio and lot, and a library of 3,500 films, including \u201cGone With the Wind.\u201d As part of the deal, he also took possession of the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog, which meant \u201cCasablanca\u201d and Looney Tunes cartoons.<\/p>\n The investment world reacted with sheer disbelief at the price tag, which left Mr. Turner\u2019s businesses with almost $2 billion in debt. The new conglomerate was \u201cone of the most debt-ridden companies of its time,\u201d according to The Wall Street Journal in 1986.<\/p>\n Within months it was obvious even to Mr. Turner that he could not generate enough revenue to cover his debt payments. So, in June 1986, he agreed to sell everything but the film library for $490 million. In the end, Mr. Turner paid a whopping $1.2 billion for just the MGM library.<\/p>\n Still crushed by debt, Mr. Turner sought to squeeze profits from his MGM library by colorizing classic black-and-white movies in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to increase their appeal among younger viewers. He was attacked by the press, filmmakers, movie buffs and politicians as a cultural philistine. Stung, he ended up colorizing only a few films, among them the 1941 Humphrey Bogart detective movie \u201cThe Maltese Falcon,\u201d before abandoning the plan amid condemnation by many actors and directors, including the filmmakers Billy Wilder and Woody Allen.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner further tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs in public forums. In 1985, The Atlanta Constitution reported that Mr. Turner had said that the MX mobile missile program and the unemployment rate could be tackled together by hiring jobless African Americans to carry missiles on their backs from one silo to another.<\/p>\n In \u201cTed Turner Speaks,\u201d a collection of his public statements compiled in 1999 by Janet Lowe, Mr. Turner was quoted<\/a> at a sports banquet as saying that he had other reasons to dislike the baseball agent Jerry Kapstein besides the fact that he \u201cis a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n In his defense, Mr. Turner\u2019s associates pointed out that he had placed Black employees, like Bill Lucas<\/a> and the Hall of Famer Hank Aaron<\/a>, to senior posts in the Atlanta Braves organization and had appointed Jews like Reese Schonfeld<\/a> to top spots at CNN.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner\u2019s second marriage did not survive this troubled period. He made no attempt to hide his liaison with a former Playboy magazine cover model, Liz Wickersham<\/a>, whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into an anchor for a CNN program. In the late 1980s, Mr. Turner and his wife, Jane Smith, divorced.<\/p>\n An Era of Prosperity<\/p>\n Faced with mounting debts and almost certain bankruptcy, Mr. Turner agreed in 1987 to sell 37 percent of Turner Broadcasting to a group of 31 cable companies for $562 million and to cede to them seven of the 15 seats on the TBS board. Moreover, he agreed not to make any expenditure of more than $2 million unless he had the approval of 12 of the 15 board members. For the first time since his father\u2019s death, Mr. Turner had to share control of his business.<\/p>\n With the days of wild gambles over, a new era of steady, spectacular prosperity was beginning for Mr. Turner. By 1989, his fortune had doubled to $5 billion. CNN and CNN Headline News reached more than 50 million households worldwide. His MGM film library, which included \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u201d and \u201cCitizen Kane,\u201d evolved into a lucrative investment after all, drawing millions of new viewers to Turner Network Television, or TNT, and then Turner Classic Movies.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner added to his empire in 1991 by purchasing<\/a>, for $320 million, Hanna-Barbera Productions, whose library included such characters as the Flintstones, the Jetsons and Yogi Bear. A year later, he introduced the Cartoon Network, a 24-hour all-cartoon channel that proved immensely popular. And in 1993, he acquired the film production companies New Line Cinema and Castle Rock.<\/p>\n His colleagues and employees began to report that Mr. Turner had mellowed. Episodes of women-chasing and tantrums declined. In interviews, Mr. Turner said he had begun taking lithium, a drug often prescribed to counter manic-depressive behavior.<\/p>\n He could still startle with his public statements. In one speech, to the American Humanist Association convention, he described Christianity as \u201ca religion for losers.\u201d Barely a year after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of student dissidents, he shocked the foreign correspondents association in Beijing by suggesting that the Chinese government was not to blame.<\/p>\n \u201cThe students should have known better, don\u2019t you think?\u201d he said. \u201cThey had been warned.\u201d Some of his critics suggested that his growing business deals with China might have colored his views.<\/p>\n Still, he remained popular with many Americans, who saw him as an affable, successful rebel. Adding to his celebrity was his unlikely courtship of Ms. Fonda. Both were wealthy and famous, but they were opposites in many ways. He was a notorious womanizer; she, an ardent feminist. He had been a right-wing conservative in his youth; she had been called Hanoi Jane for speaking out on North Vietnamese radio against the American military effort during the Vietnam War. He loved to hunt; she was an environmentalist.<\/p>\n He wooed her \u2014 just after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden<\/a> \u2014 by emphasizing their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Ms. Fonda\u2019s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Mr. Castro. She later wrote in a memoir that she had been dazzled by his charisma, which she likened to \u201ca 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.\u201d<\/p>\n The couple married in 1991 \u2014 the third marriage for each \u2014 and in subsequent years, Mr. Turner devoted more of his time to environmentalism and global peace, while Ms. Fonda virtually retired from Hollywood to devote herself to Mr. Turner and his new causes.<\/p>\n Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Ms. Fonda saying his insatiable need for other women and her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, were underlying causes.<\/p>\n Mr. Turner\u2019s survivors include two daughters, Laura Turner Seydel<\/a>, who is chair emeritus of the Captain Planet Foundation, a Turner environmental group, and Sara Jean Turner Garlington,<\/a> who goes by Jennie, an environmentalist and trustee of the Turner Foundation.<\/p>\n He is also survived by three sons, Robert E. Turner IV<\/a>, known as Teddy, who has been an executive with Turner television interests; Rhett Lee Turner<\/a>, a filmmaker and photographer; and Reed Beauregard Turner<\/a>, known as Beau, who is board chairman of the Turner Endangered Species Fund; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n Moving Beyond Empire-Building<\/p>\n By the mid-1990s, Mr. Turner appeared to have reached the limit of his empire-building ambitions. In 1995, he reached a deal to merge his Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner by agreeing to exchange all his company shares for $7.5 billion worth of Time Warner stock. Gerald M. Levin<\/a>, the Time Warner boss, became chairman and chief executive of the new conglomerate, which kept the Time Warner name, while Mr. Turner accepted the post of vice chairman.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been a C.E.O. for 33 years, and that\u2019s a long time for anyone,\u201d Mr. Turner told The New York Times<\/a> in 1995, adding later, \u201cI\u2019m married to Jane Fonda, so I know what it\u2019s like to be No. 2.\u201d In 2001, when the internet company AOL bought Time Warner for $160 billion, creating the world\u2019s biggest media enterprise, Mr. Turner moved further down the corporate hierarchy and resigned<\/a> from the board two years later.<\/p>\n At times, Mr. Turner seemed more enthusiastic about charitable and environmental causes than business. In 1986, he delved back into the sports world, creating the Goodwill Games, athletic competitions among nations that were originally intended to ease Cold War tensions. A charitable effort, it disbanded<\/a> after 15 years and five international events.<\/p>\n By 1996, he had amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of ranch land, roughly enough to fill the state of Delaware, on eight ranches in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska. His herd of 12,000 buffalo was one of the largest in the nation. And he announced that his land would be kept undeveloped and later set aside for nature preserves.<\/p>\n He started renewable energy ventures; opened a chain of restaurants that serve bison, Ted\u2019s Montana Grill, in an effort to create a market for the meat and therefore preserve the animal from extinction; and founded what is now Ted Turner Reserves, offering guided \u201ceco-conscious\u201d tours and luxury lodging at vast properties in New Mexico.<\/p>\n He also became a major philanthropist, creating foundations devoted to protecting the environment, supporting the United Nations and reducing the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.<\/p>\n