Thank You, Captain Outrageous

Ted Turner was a businessman and a bon vivant. He was a TV pioneer and sports team owner. He was a yachtsman, winning the America’s Cup in 1977. He was a rancher and restaurateur. He was a philanthropist. He was a lot of things, and he also married a lot, including once to Jane Fonda. He had a lot of nicknames: “Mouth of the South,” “Terrible Ted,” and “Captain Outrageous.” (They were usually bestowed on him by jealous rivals.) 

Turner was born in Ohio and educated in Tennessee. He spent the majority of his life in Georgia, but most of his retirement in Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Florida. The accent he possessed had a bit of both midwestern nasal resonance and southern drawl. He was kicked out of prestigious Brown University for having a woman in his dorm room, mere days before graduation.

Yes, he founded TBS and CNN, The Cartoon Network, and a dozen other cable channels. He took the profits from those and bought MGM. He took MGM’s film library and sold the rest off five months later. TCM (Turner Classic Movies) came next. (Amazon bought the movie collection in 2022 for $8.45 Billion). Through merger after merger, Ted became one of the biggest media moguls on earth. He was a bigshot, and he let everyone know it. He knew how to command attention from all the news outlets, including his own. He took his father’s failing $2 million billboard company and turned it into a $2 billion media company. Mr. Turner was named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1991 – five years before becoming their majority stock owner.

Ted is the reason I am still an Atlanta Braves fan. I grew up watching baseball on TBS. Why? Because it was the only game in town (Ted ruled cable). He also owned the Atlanta Hawks and Thrashers and founded WCW – World Championship Wrestling. He started the Goodwill Games after the US and USSR boycotted each other. He donated over $2 billion to charity. Later in life, he founded Ted’s Montana Grill. It’s awesome. There’s one in Alexandria. You should go.

Just like taking movies from MGM and running them on TCM, he used buffalo from his ranches and served them as burgers in the restaurants. He was a master of vertical integration. I learned a lot about business from him. 

I’ll never forget the advice he gave young entrepreneurs on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2003 – “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” I wrote that quote on a piece of paper and stuck it on the wall next to my desk.

Memories of the man will fade over time….probably a long time, because he was larger than life. Yet his legacy will be one of bold, brash business and philanthropic moves that captured our imaginations. He fundamentally changed news coverage, the way we look at politics and the world, and put actionable conservation on the map. He managed to conserve over 2 million acres of ranch land. Upon his death, he was the 4th largest land owner in the US, and 99% is open to you and me.

And yes, Ted was flawed. He made mistakes, and some of his political leanings were at odds with my own. He said several things that got him into trouble. But I still admired the guy.

Ted Turner died May 6th after a long bout with dementia at 87. There will never be another like him. Thank you, Captain Outrageous, for the inspo.