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Ted Turner

Media entrepreneur and philanthropist, Robert Edward Turner III was born in 1938. After a brief stint in the Coast Guard, he began to work as an account executive in the 1960s and, later, as a general manager at his father’s company, the Turner Advertising Company. In 1963, Turner inherited the suffering company upon the death of his father. Under Turner’s direction, the company began to turn a profit, and, in 1970, he ventured into the fledgling cable industry and bought a television station. Upon Turner’s purchase, the Atlanta-based independent Channel 17 was financially uncertain, losing over a half million dollars every year. However, in 1975, Turner’s became one of the first cable companies to transmit using a communications satellite, thereby building a significantly larger customer base. As a result, the major increase in ad sales revenue soon established WTBS at the forefront of the cable industry. During the 1980s, Turner established two additional networks, Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980 and Turner Network Television (TNT) in 1988. In 1995, however, he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner for $7.5 billion, a business move that launched a revolution of mergers within the cable industry. After the Federal Trade Commission approved the deal in 1996, Turner took... Next

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