Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87
Ted Turner, the media mogul who reduce a brash and vivid determine on the American scene of the late twentieth century by dominating the cable tv trade, creating the 24-hour information cycle with CNN, and extending his stressed attain into skilled sports activities, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his dwelling close to Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.
Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the household, confirmed the dying. Mr. Turner introduced in 2018 that he had Lewy physique dementia, a progressive mind dysfunction.
Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized tv information in 1980 by presenting all of it hours of the day and finally inspiring different media operations to observe swimsuit. But his portfolio of enterprise ventures bulged with way more, and their affect on American tradition was appreciable.
As a by-product of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He based the cable and satellite tv for pc sports activities and leisure “superstation” that grew to become often called TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, each of which proceed to achieve tens of millions of properties.
In 1985, he purchased for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of movies and 9 years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made the same buy of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, counting on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media corporations.
Along the approach, he discovered the time and vitality to captain the successful yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an energetic function as proprietor of the Atlanta Braves, giving the workforce prolonged nationwide publicity on Turner-owned tv.
“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he informed the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”
Not even his staunchest admirers positioned Mr. Turner on that top a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who as soon as had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — needed to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the historical past of mass media.
An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding dangers in enterprise, typically teetering on the edge of chapter and then roaring again to multiply his fortune.
Against the recommendation of colleagues and the typical knowledge of his trade friends, he poured tens of millions of {dollars} into pioneering ventures that mixed cable and satellite tv for pc broadcasts. He warred towards the huge tv networks. He virtually misplaced his shirt in Hollywood however emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride an unlimited cable empire of information, sports activities and leisure channels.
His private life, too, was turbulent. His three marriages — his final, ending in 2001, was to the Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda — had been typically rocked by his open shows of infidelity, heavy ingesting and in any other case boorish conduct.
Nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” for his self-aggrandizing claims and a repute for allotting gratuitous insults, Mr. Turner — tall and slim with a craggy, mustachioed face — might nonetheless be a person of nice appeal, whose gaffes had been repeatedly forgiven by an indulgent public, which largely thought of him a residing American legend.
Mr. Turner’s politics had been contradictory and controversial. While claiming to be an archconservative Republican with heat ties to Christian evangelicals and far-right John Birch Society members, he additionally befriended the Cuban chief Fidel Castro and defended the repressive conduct of the Communist Chinese authorities.
In a unprecedented act of philanthropy, he donated a billion dollars to the United Nations, a company loathed by American conservatives. He adored searching, but he grew to become a darling of environmentalists by shopping for greater than 1,000,000 acres of wilderness and ranch land and then setting them apart as nature preserves. He became the fourth-largest private landowner in the United States, with two million acres, along with huge tracts he owned in Argentina and different international locations.
Mr. Turner’s affect was most obvious in the approach his CNN remodeled tv information by presenting it round the clock with fixed updates, conveying a way of immediacy.
“Today, news is available when it actually happens, not when it’s convenient for the three broadcast networks to carry it,” the father-and-son authors Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg wrote of their 1995 biography, “Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon.” Whether overlaying the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crushing of the Chinese scholar motion in Tiananmen Square or the Persian Gulf conflict of 1991, Mr. Turner’s CNN was the automobile to view historical past in the making.
“I learn more from CNN than I do from the C.I.A.,” President George H.W. Bush was extensively quoted as saying at the time of the conflict.
Mr. Turner himself professed to not be terribly fascinated about information or some other sort of enterprise. It was the thrill of the hunt that drove him, not the quarry. As he informed The New York Times, “I’ve always been more of an adventurer than a businessman.”
‘Captain Courageous’
Robert Edward Turner III — who was universally often called Ted — was born on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. His father, Robert Jr., a local Mississippian whose household had grown cotton, moved to Ohio throughout the Depression and married Florence Rooney, the daughter of a Cincinnati grocery chain proprietor.
The elder Mr. Turner, often called Ed, later moved the household again south, to Georgia, the place he began a billboard promoting firm. In interviews and biographies, Ted Turner described him as an abusive alcoholic whom he nonetheless admired and sought to please.
As a youth, Ted Turner attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., at the time an elite all-white navy academy that emphasised conservative Christian values. During the summers, he labored for his father’s firm, portray billboards. His father made him use his wages to pay for his room and meals at dwelling in Savannah.
Ted graduated in 1956 with ok grades to realize entrance to Brown University. But he was no mannequin scholar. A former classmate, William Kennedy, who went on to turn out to be a Brown University official, was quoted in “Citizen Turner” as describing younger Ted as “a bigot, as maybe all of us were in a sense at the time.”
Mr. Turner, he stated, drank excessively, sang Nazi songs outdoors a Jewish fraternity home and put up Ku Klux Klan indicators on the dormitory doorways of Black college students. He was lastly tossed out of Brown after being caught in mattress with a lady in his dorm room.
Mr. Turner then joined his father’s firm, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which grew to become the largest of its sort in the South, typically working laborious however typically devoting extra vitality to events and to crusing, which might turn out to be a lifelong ardour.
In 1963, his 53-year-old father, after incurring steep money owed to broaden his billboard operations and combating alcohol and drug abuse and melancholy, shot himself to dying in an upstairs rest room at the Turner dwelling outdoors Savannah.
Ted Turner, then 24, was devastated and left feeling “alone,” he informed Time journal, “because I had counted on him to make the judgment on whether or not I was a success.” In addition, he was nonetheless mourning the latest dying of his youthful sister, Mary Jean, from the autoimmune illness lupus and encephalitis. He described her dying as the cause he misplaced his non secular religion, but in addition as what galvanized him to turn out to be a “superachiever” in enterprise.
Spurning the counsel of his father’s buddies and accountants to dump the enterprise, he insisted on operating it intact.
His ambition didn’t finish with billboards, nevertheless. In 1970, he went into debt to purchase a small, failing Atlanta tv station, which he renamed WTCG, for Turner Communications Group, the title he gave his father’s firm in the late ’60s after he started shopping for radio stations. He figured he would use billboards to promote his new tv enterprise. Lacking sufficient programming and drawing little promoting income, the station continued to hemorrhage purple ink.
His enterprise advisers recommended him towards the buy.
“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.”
An Explosive Expansion
Mr. Turner went additional into debt in 1976 to purchase the Atlanta Braves, then a dismal baseball workforce. The buy value was $500,000 in money and $8 million at 6 p.c annual curiosity over 10 years. (Forty years later, the Braves franchise was value $1.175 billion, in accordance with Forbes.)
This time, his gamble paid off. By broadcasting all 162 Braves video games on WTCG, he was capable of fill an enormous programming void for a pittance of what it could have price to purchase or produce different packages. Soon the station’s money stream was on the rise. (He additionally purchased the Atlanta Hawks basketball franchise, in 1977.)
Rather than use the new cash to pay down his money owed, Mr. Turner took on extra loans to broaden his tv enterprise by satellite tv for pc broadcasting. He confronted hefty charges for the use of an RCA satellite tv for pc and needed to buy costly new broadcasting gear.
This, too, was a successful gamble. He appropriately surmised that he might use the satellite tv for pc to beam his Atlanta station’s sign and its substantial sports activities programming to cable methods all through the nation. In this manner, what would turn out to be often called TBS — for Turner Broadcasting System, the new firm title he adopted for the nation’s first “superstation” — was born in late 1976. In addition to sports activities, he featured a gradual stream of outdated films and reruns of “Lassie” and “I Love Lucy” at comparatively little price.
At a time when the nascent cable trade wanted to show its programming worth to subscribers, Mr. Turner’s station was thought of important to cable’s development and enlargement.
At the identical time, Mr. Turner was growing a harmful repute for philandering, drunkenness and public misconduct. His tumultuous first marriage, to Julia Nye (with whom he had two kids, Laura and Teddy Jr.), resulted in the early Nineteen Sixties shortly after Mr. Turner competed towards his spouse in a yacht race. Seeing she was on the verge of successful, he rammed her boat together with his.
Later, he publicly humiliated his second spouse, 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 video games.
Mr. Turner’s antics prolonged to the workplace. If he had been displeased with a presentation, he would possibly hurl its written textual content throughout the room and loudly denigrate his staff, in accordance with his biographers the Goldbergs. To win extra enterprise, he typically resorted to histrionics.
“Turner would do anything to sell his station to advertisers,” the authors wrote in “Citizen Turner.” “He’d jump up on chairs, on desks, on tables, on anything that didn’t 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’d been shot and cry, ‘You’re killing me!’”
In 1977, he was barred from baseball for nearly a yr by the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, for tampering with one other workforce’s participant, Gary Matthews, a free-agent outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, and for ignoring edicts by Mr. Kuhn. Mr. Turner responded, “I’m thankful he didn’t have me shot.”
During these years of anxious debt issues and explosive enterprise enlargement, Mr. Turner spent months at a time crusing and successful yachting accolades. In 1970 and once more in 1973, he was named Yachtsman of the Year by the United States Sailing Association, having realized to sail at his hometown Savannah Yacht Club, and he set his sights on successful the prestigious America’s Cup.
He first needed to overcome the preliminary objections of the tradition-bound New York Yacht Club. Membership in the membership was required for any entrant in the America’s Cup competitors, and the membership’s officers had been uneasy about Mr. Turner’s rowdy repute.
In the finish, nevertheless, he was just too good a yachtsman to reject, and the objections had been dropped. He fared poorly in his America’s Cup debut, in 1974, and subsequently bought the yacht Courageous from Ted Hood, who had proved victorious with it in 1974.
Mr. Turner put collectively a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so solely after coming near being thrown out of the races as soon as he had been accepted. “During the Cup eliminations,” Time journal reported, “he 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’s blue bloods positively purple.”
The Cup organizers pressured Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to at least one elite membership, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting feminine members. “I wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,” Mr. Turner wrote to the membership president.
But on successful the Cup, he surrounded himself with younger, engaging ladies and was too drunk to complete a victory speech at a nationally televised information convention.
He continued to function skipper in main open-sea races, notably in the catastrophic 1979 Fastnet Race, organized by the Royal Ocean Racing Club, in the Irish Sea. Unexpectedly fierce winds broken and sank many boats, killing 15 sailors. Of about 300 starters, solely 85 completed, and Mr. Turner’s yacht, Tenacious, was named the winner.
“Like any experience,” Mr. Turner said at the time, “whenever you come through it you feel better. We’re 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.”
The triumphs on water turned Mr. Turner into an American hero, and he used his new recognition to his enterprise benefit. On June 1, 1980, he launched CNN, the first 24-hour all-news channel, basing it in Atlanta, pointedly removed from the conventional information capitals of New York and Washington. Less than two years later, he started broadcasting CNN Headline News, with updates each half-hour.
CNN Is Born
CNN struggled initially, dropping as much as $2 million a month in its first two years. When the community first went on the air, it had fewer than two million viewers, in contrast with the three huge networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — whose information broadcasts collectively reached greater than 50 million households. And Mr. Turner needed to depend on his viewers’s endurance together with his inexperienced, underpaid information workers and repeated technical issues that left anchors with out copy or footage.
Competitors derided CNN as the “Chicken Noodle Network,” and Mr. Turner’s community needed to sue the Reagan administration and the three rival networks to realize inclusion in the White House press pool.
The must fill 24 hours of protection was daunting. Mr. Turner and his prime executives went on a hiring binge, recruiting pundits corresponding to Robert Novak and discovering anchors and hosts like Lou Dobbs and Larry King from native TV stations and the world of radio, respectively. They constructed from scratch a sprawling worldwide framework for the newsroom’s operations.
Ahead of the floor operations in the Persian Gulf War, CNN discovered itself with a serious benefit. The community’s correspondent Peter Arnett was amongst the solely Western reporters in Baghdad, offering sturdy on-the-ground reporting from the metropolis below assault from U.S. forces. By distinction, rivals had been outdoors the nation, and their dispatches had been much more depending on official U.S. authorities statements.
CNN’s protection from Iraq introduced it a prestigious Peabody Award, which famous that it had “matured from a cable curiosity to become an international service of inestimable importance.” Mr. Turner appeared on Time magazine’s cover as “Man of the Year” for 1991.
As CNN was constructing respectability, Mr. Turner was ready to attract public sympathy in his efforts to painting himself as a patriotic underdog in the battle towards the community giants for bigger audiences. Claiming to symbolize conservative household values, he attacked the networks’ senior executives as a “bunch of pinkos.”
“In the race for ratings, their newscasts dig up the most sordid things human beings do,” Mr. Turner informed Newsweek in 1980. “They make heroes of criminals and glamorize violence. They’ve polluted our minds and our children’s minds.”
Mr. Turner might stake out political positions far to the left of the main networks when it suited him, nevertheless. In 1982, for instance, he returned from a go to to Cuba full of reward for Mr. Castro. When CNN executives upbraided him for declaring the Cuban chief “a great guy,” Mr. Turner was reported to have retorted: “Castro’s not a Communist. He’s like me, a dictator.” He even persuaded Mr. Castro to movie a promotional advert for CNN.
Nonetheless, in his battle towards the networks, Mr. Turner counted amongst his allies outstanding members of the John Birch Society and right-wing Christian evangelical ministers like the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Donald Wildmon. They missed Mr. Turner’s bawdy way of life whereas applauding his requires extra household values in broadcasting.
Cable station operators noticed the strident Mr. Turner as their champion towards the networks, and signed as much as obtain his CNN and TBS superstation.
With CNN beginning to be worthwhile and TBS incomes a windfall, Mr. Turner was able to roll the cube as soon as once more. In 1985, he introduced a hostile bid for CBS, then the largest tv community, for $5.4 billion in inventory and junk bonds. The proposed deal shocked the media trade as a result of Mr. Turner was proposing to have his firm, TBS, with annual income of lower than $300 million, take over an enormous conglomerate with income of virtually $5 billion.
CBS counterattacked by adopting a so-called poison capsule, borrowing a billion {dollars} to purchase again 21 p.c of its inventory. In impact, CBS was warning Mr. Turner that if his takeover bid had been to succeed, he could be saddled with an impossibly giant debt. Admitting defeat, he withdrew his bid in July 1985.
A month later, Mr. Turner was again in the headlines with an settlement to purchase the Hollywood movie firm MGM-UA Entertainment — itself a latest merger of MGM and United Artists — from the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian for $1.5 billion. Under the phrases of the deal, which was accomplished in March 1986, Mr. Turner took over the MGM studio and lot, and a library of 3,500 movies, together with “Gone With the Wind.” As half of the deal, he additionally took possession of the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog, which meant “Casablanca” and Looney Tunes cartoons.
The funding world reacted with sheer disbelief at the price ticket, which left Mr. Turner’s companies with virtually $2 billion in debt. The new conglomerate was “one of the most debt-ridden companies of its time,” in accordance with The Wall Street Journal in 1986.
Within months it was apparent even to Mr. Turner that he couldn’t generate sufficient income to cowl his debt funds. So, in June 1986, he agreed to promote all the things however the movie library for $490 million. In the finish, Mr. Turner paid a whopping $1.2 billion for simply the MGM library.
Still crushed by debt, Mr. Turner sought to squeeze earnings from his MGM library by colorizing traditional black-and-white films in what turned out to be a misguided try to extend their enchantment amongst youthful viewers. He was attacked by the press, filmmakers, film buffs and politicians as a cultural philistine. Stung, he ended up colorizing just a few movies, amongst them the 1941 Humphrey Bogart detective film “The Maltese Falcon,” earlier than abandoning the plan amid condemnation by many actors and administrators, together with the filmmakers Billy Wilder and Woody Allen.
Mr. Turner additional tarnished his picture by uttering ethnic and racial slurs in public boards. In 1985, The Atlanta Constitution reported that Mr. Turner had stated that the MX cellular missile program and the unemployment price could possibly be tackled collectively by hiring jobless African Americans to hold missiles on their backs from one silo to a different.
In “Ted Turner Speaks,” a group of his public statements compiled in 1999 by Janet Lowe, Mr. Turner was quoted at a sports activities banquet as saying that he had different causes to dislike the baseball agent Jerry Kapstein moreover the incontrovertible fact that he “is a Jew.”
In his protection, Mr. Turner’s associates identified that he had positioned Black staff, like Bill Lucas and the Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, to senior posts in the Atlanta Braves group and had appointed Jews like Reese Schonfeld to prime spots at CNN.
Mr. Turner’s second marriage didn’t survive this troubled interval. He made no try to cover his liaison with a former Playboy journal cowl mannequin, Liz Wickersham, whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to show into an anchor for a CNN program. In the late Nineteen Eighties, Mr. Turner and his spouse, Jane Smith, divorced.
An Era of Prosperity
Faced with mounting money owed and virtually sure chapter, Mr. Turner agreed in 1987 to promote 37 p.c of Turner Broadcasting to a gaggle of 31 cable corporations for $562 million and to cede to them seven of the 15 seats on the TBS board. Moreover, he agreed to not make any expenditure of greater than $2 million except he had the approval of 12 of the 15 board members. For the first time since his father’s dying, Mr. Turner needed to share management of his enterprise.
With the days of wild gambles over, a brand new period of regular, spectacular prosperity was starting for Mr. Turner. By 1989, his fortune had doubled to $5 billion. CNN and CNN Headline News reached greater than 50 million households worldwide. His MGM movie library, which included “The Wizard of Oz” and “Citizen Kane,” advanced right into a profitable funding in any case, drawing tens of millions of new viewers to Turner Network Television, or TNT, and then Turner Classic Movies.
Mr. Turner added to his empire in 1991 by purchasing, for $320 million, Hanna-Barbera Productions, whose library included such characters as the Flintstones, the Jetsons and Yogi Bear. A yr later, he launched the Cartoon Network, a 24-hour all-cartoon channel that proved immensely in style. And in 1993, he acquired the movie manufacturing corporations New Line Cinema and Castle Rock.
His colleagues and staff started to report that Mr. Turner had mellowed. Episodes of women-chasing and tantrums declined. In interviews, Mr. Turner stated he had begun taking lithium, a drug typically prescribed to counter manic-depressive conduct.
He might nonetheless startle together with his public statements. In one speech, to the American Humanist Association conference, he described Christianity as “a religion for losers.” Barely a yr after the 1989 Tiananmen Square bloodbath of scholar dissidents, he shocked the overseas correspondents affiliation in Beijing by suggesting that the Chinese authorities was to not blame.
“The students should have known better, don’t you think?” he stated. “They had been warned.” Some of his critics urged that his rising enterprise offers with China may need coloured his views.
Still, he remained in style with many Americans, who noticed him as an affable, profitable insurgent. Adding to his movie star was his unlikely courtship of Ms. Fonda. Both had been rich and well-known, however they had been opposites in some ways. He was a infamous womanizer; she, an ardent feminist. He had been a right-wing conservative in his youth; she had been referred to as Hanoi Jane for talking out on North Vietnamese radio towards the American navy effort throughout the Vietnam War. He liked to hunt; she was an environmentalist.
He wooed her — simply after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden — by emphasizing their similarities, together with as the kids of a suicidal mother or father (in Ms. Fonda’s case, her mom) 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 “a 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.”
The couple married in 1991 — the third marriage for every — and in subsequent years, Mr. Turner devoted extra of his time to environmentalism and world peace, whereas Ms. Fonda just about retired from Hollywood to dedicate herself to Mr. Turner and his new causes.
Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Ms. Fonda saying his insatiable want for different ladies and her personal deepening spirituality, together with an embrace of Christianity, had been underlying causes.
Mr. Turner’s survivors embrace two daughters, Laura Turner Seydel, who’s chair emeritus of the Captain Planet Foundation, a Turner environmental group, and Sara Jean Turner Garlington, who goes by Jennie, an environmentalist and trustee of the Turner Foundation.
He can be survived by three sons, Robert E. Turner IV, often called Teddy, who has been an government with Turner tv pursuits; Rhett Lee Turner, a filmmaker and photographer; and Reed Beauregard Turner, often called Beau, who’s board chairman of the Turner Endangered Species Fund; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Moving Beyond Empire-Building
By the mid-Nineties, Mr. Turner appeared to have reached the restrict of his empire-building ambitions. In 1995, he reached a deal to merge his Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner by agreeing to alternate all his firm shares for $7.5 billion value of Time Warner inventory. Gerald M. Levin, the Time Warner boss, grew to become chairman and chief government of the new conglomerate, which stored the Time Warner title, whereas Mr. Turner accepted the submit of vice chairman.
“I’ve been a C.E.O. for 33 years, and that’s a long time for anyone,” Mr. Turner told The New York Times in 1995, including later, “I’m married to Jane Fonda, so I know what it’s like to be No. 2.” In 2001, when the web firm AOL purchased Time Warner for $160 billion, creating the world’s greatest media enterprise, Mr. Turner moved additional down the company hierarchy and resigned from the board two years later.
At occasions, Mr. Turner appeared extra captivated with charitable and environmental causes than enterprise. In 1986, he delved again into the sports activities world, creating the Goodwill Games, athletic competitions amongst nations that had been initially supposed to ease Cold War tensions. A charitable effort, it disbanded after 15 years and 5 worldwide occasions.
By 1996, he had amassed practically 1.3 million acres of ranch land, roughly sufficient 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 introduced that his land could be stored undeveloped and later put aside for nature preserves.
He began renewable vitality ventures; opened a series of eating places that serve bison, Ted’s Montana Grill, in an effort to create a marketplace for the meat and subsequently protect the animal from extinction; and based what’s now Ted Turner Reserves, providing guided “eco-conscious” excursions and luxurious lodging at huge properties in New Mexico.
He additionally grew to become a serious philanthropist, creating foundations dedicated to defending the atmosphere, supporting the United Nations and lowering the menace of nuclear, chemical and organic warfare.
A $1 billion donation to the U.N. in 1997, disbursed over 10 years, was aimed at aiding refugees and kids, clearing land mines and combating illness.
With typical brashness, Mr. Turner stated the billion-dollar donation represented simply the improve in his internet value in the earlier 9 months, and he referred to as on different rich businesspeople to observe his philanthropic instance.
“There’s a lot of people who are awash in money they don’t know what to do with,” Mr. Turner stated in a CNN interview with Mr. King after the announcement. “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.”
