After his father’s suicide, Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III was CEO of Turner Advertising Company, which he had saved. According to his autobiography, his work life was improving, but his personal life was hectic. His son Teddy was born in March 1963, three months after his father’s death. And by the end of that year, he was getting divorced and Judy had moved with the children to Chicago to be near family. Turner was 25 years old and a divorced father of two. In 1964, he met Jane Smith and married her in less than a year. Shortly thereafter, his son Rhett was born.

Ted wanted to expand. He acquired a Chattanooga, Tennessee, billboard company for $1 million and a Knoxville, Tennessee, billboard company at an estate auction for $53,000. Shortly after these deals, the outdoor advertising business began looking less attractive to Turner because of proposed legislation and advertisers’ exploration of television. Television’s future looked bright, and Turner decided to model his company after Combined Communication, which Karl Eller expanded from a billboard company to include radio and television. Ted bought radio stations in Florida and South Carolina, but he decided he didn’t like the radio business.

By the late 1960s, Turner set his sights on Channel 17, eventually known as WTCG, a financially struggling UHF television station in Atlanta. The owner wanted $2.5 million. Turner didn’t have cash, so he merged with the station. He retained 47% ownership and changed the company name to Turner Communications Group. Turner also bought a bankrupt Charlotte, North Carolina, station, WRET, for less than $1 million; he did this investment personally. The stations were a financial drain. Low on cash, unable to pay suppliers, and at risk of going off the air, Turner did an on-air telethon to raise money. He raised $25,000 and generated goodwill in the community.

Ted recognized that programming should be his focus because it attracted viewers, which led to more revenue from advertisers. His strategy was to find areas where competitors weren’t meeting viewers’ needs and fill those gaps. He paid $600,000 to air sixty Atlanta Braves baseball games a year and went on to cut deals to air Atlanta Hawks basketball games and Atlanta Flames hockey games. His strategy worked: WTGC went from $900,000 in losses in 1970 to $1 million in profit in 1973.

The Braves ownership, losing $1 million a year, offered Turner the chance to purchase the team for $10 million, which he did in 1976. This gave him control of long-term TV rights and guaranteed unique programming.

Turner was still focused on growing his TV stations. This required growing viewers, but there weren’t unlimited viewers in Atlanta. He needed to gain viewers in other markets. He kept hearing about “community antenna television,” so he investigated it. This new technology, better known as cable TV, allowed him to access views in other markets. He learned through trial and error that satellites were the key and built the first satellite uplink station in Atlanta. He changed his company name to Turner Broadcasting System Inc. (TBS) and changed the Atlanta TV station name to SuperStation. The first satellite transmission occurred in December 1976.

With TBS distributed by satellite throughout the southeast, Turner recognized he was sitting on a gold mine. Cable was growing rapidly. As cable operators expanded their coverage areas, they added subscribers. As they added more subscribers, the per-subscriber fees they paid increased, which meant more revenue—but few or no incremental costs—for TBS. Programming (i.e., unique content) was the key to capitalizing on this gold mine and growing revenues and profits rapidly.

Tuner saw news as great content, but it was delivered at times that weren’t convenient for everyone. Turner decided to start a twenty-four-hour-a-day news channel to fill this gap and named it Cable News Network, or CNN. He decided to launch on June 1, 1980. This decision would change his trajectory forever.

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Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III is an entrepreneur known for the Turner Broadcasting System, which birthed the CNN, TBS, and TNT cable channels. Everyone in Atlanta knows of Turner, but I decided to buy his autobiography, Call Me Ted, after reading about his financing deal for MGM/UA in the biography of Kirk Kerkorian.

Turner was born in 1938 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was sent to boarding school when he was four years old, when his father joined the Navy and his younger sister Mary Jean and mother joined his father on base. Ted’s father was a complicated man. He moved the family to Savannah, Georgia, when he acquired a small billboard company in 1947. He enrolled Ted in The McCallie School, then a Christian military academy in Tennessee. At age twelve, Ted began working 42-and-a-half hours a week at his father’s company in the summers, usually doing manual labor with outside crews.

Growing up in Savannah, Turner learned to sail by joining his dad on sailing trips. His love for sailing was the deciding factor in attending Brown University, which is located on Narragansett Bay in Providence, Rhode Island. After his freshman year, his parents divorced, and his mother and sister moved back to Cincinnati. After Turner lost a bet and failed to honor a commitment to his father, his father stopped giving him a weekly $5 allowance. Frustrated about the situation with his father, he fell in with the wrong crowd and got suspended for the rest of the school year. To fill his time, he joined the Coast Guard as a reservist until he could return to Brown the following semester. Then, after declaring classics as his major, Ted had a nasty falling out with his father, who refused to pay his tuition any longer. He was forced to leave Brown.

Turner briefly moved to the Miami area but was broke, so he started working for his dad’s company, Turner Advertising Company, in 1959. At 21, Turner married Judy Nye, a fellow sailing enthusiast he’d dated long distance. A few months later, his sister Mary Jean died; she was just 17.

Turner moved to Macon, Georgia, with his new bride to take over a small billboard company his dad had acquired. At just 21, Turner ran the company, and within two years he’d doubled its revenue. His marriage with Judy was rocky, but they welcomed a daughter, Laura, in 1961.

In 1962, Ted’s father made a deal with an entrepreneur from Minnesota to purchase General Outdoor Inc., a larger billboard company based in Atlanta. The $4 million deal was financed with debt, and Ted’s father split the acquired assets with the other entrepreneur. Ted moved to Atlanta to help run the leasing department of the acquired company; his family stayed in Macon.

After closing the deal, the fear of losing everything because of the debt load consumed the elder Turner. His behavior became erratic, and he checked into rehab. One day he announced he was selling a big part of the company to the Minnesota billboard entrepreneur, which shocked Ted because it had only been a few months since the closing. A few days later, in March 1963, the elder Turner committed suicide.

Ted was in shock, but he had to pick up the pieces. He was the executor of his father’s estate. The deal to sell General Outdoors assets was signed the day before his father died. It was an informal handwritten note, but it was binding. Turner started renewing billboard leases with General Outdoors customers in the name of his Macon company, which reduced the value of General Outdoor assets being acquired. The buyer was angry and offered to pay $200,000 to have all leases returned, or Turner could pay him $200,000 to retain all the General Outdoor assets. Turner picked the latter but didn’t cash; he paid using his company stock. Cash was still an issue because the $600,000 first payment on the General Outdoors debt was coming due. Turner went into fire-sale mode and sold his father’s 1,000-acre plantation and commercial real estate to raise the funds. He kept his father’s company intact.

Turner was now ready to start rebuilding his family’s empire, but first he’d have to resolve his personal troubles.

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