World Changers

Ted Turner was all of twenty-four years old when his father crawled into the bathtub of his home in South Carolina and shot himself dead. His father had been a volatile and increasingly unpredictable man, taking heavy doses of prescription drugs to ease a depression that had gripped him. He lost his battle with those inner demons in March of 1963.

For Turner, it was an unspeakable tragedy that would ultimately change the course of his life. Though his alcoholic father had sent him to boarding school at the age of four and beaten him with a wire hanger as a child, Turner felt as if he had lost his best friend. His father had been his best man at his first wedding. And his father had taught him the fundamentals of business.

“It was a terrible loss and I tried not to dwell on it,” Turner recalled years later. “When he passed away, I went to work even harder and worked eighteen hours a day so I wouldn’t have to think about it. If I sat down in a chair in a room and thought about it, it might have killed me. It was so painful.”

When he died, his father had a net worth of some $2 million. After estate taxes and some $500,000 that had been left to Turner’s stepmother, the rest of the estate—worth slightly under $1 million and largely composed of his father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising Co.—had been left to Turner.

As the family’s only living child, Turner took the company over and poured every ounce of himself into his work as chairman and president. It was a business he knew well because at the age of twelve, he was already laboring forty-two-hour weeks during the summer for his father, posting signs and cutting down weeds in front of the billboards along the highways. And when he was suspended from Brown University for having a girl in his dorm room, Turner left school to join his father’s business.

He used the billboard company’s cash flow to buy several radio stations and then a UHF TV station in Atlanta that would ultimately set the stage for his biggest accomplishment: as founder of the cable news network CNN, the first dedicated twenty-four-hour cable news channel. It would revolutionize the coverage of news around the world and make Turner a billionaire many times over. He also founded WTBS, the first superstation in cable television.

After merging his business with Time Warner in 1996, he was soon worth $10 billion. But shortly after the deal and a disastrous merger between Time Warner and Internet player AOL, Turner was pushed aside by Time Warner brass, even though he was vice chairman and the company’s largest individual stockholder. Then the Internet bubble burst and AOL Time Warner stock went into a free fall. Turner lost nearly $10 million a day for two and a half years. “I sat there loyally and went down the drain with everybody else,” he says.

When it was all over, he had lost $7 billion of his $10 billion fortune. Still, he pledged to give away $1 billion of what was left to the United Nations. Turner has also devoted his assets to environmental causes. He was the largest private landowner in the United States until surpassed by cable mogul John C. Malone in 2011. On his ranches, Turner has amassed the largest herd of bison in the world and is the cofounder of Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain, which has now grown to forty-six restaurants in sixteen states.

My dad had some unusual ideas but he was a very clever businessman. He was also as ethical and honest as the day is long. Before he got into billboards he owned a little car business and he called it “Honest Ed’s Used Cars.” There were many days when he’d drive me to and from work and the entire ride he’d only talk to me about business. We’d cover everything from detailed accounting principles like depreciation to broader concepts like motivation techniques and the importance of luring and motivating good people.

As a boy I saw firsthand the value of hard work and customer relations. It was almost as though he gave me the business degree I didn’t get in college. Oftentimes he’d punctuate his lessons with funny stories or memorable expressions. Once, to drive home a point about the difficulties of attracting good, loyal employees, he told me, “Heck, Jesus only had to pick twelve disciples and even one of those didn’t turn out well.” One of his favorite mottos was one I’ve used myself ever since: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise!”

You have to have a lot of courage, and you have to have a lot of imagination. You can do a lot of things from scratch that aren’t going to work out. I can tell you how I did it. I spent a lot of time thinking. I had done a lot of reading, and when I had spare time, a lot of times I would just think and not waste my time watching TV. I watched very little television growing up, hardly any at all. Your mind is just like any other muscle in your body. If you want to have a sharp mind, you need to use it. Just like if you want to have strong muscles, you better work out a lot, so I worked my mind out all the time, and then when I needed it, I would put it to use. Like developing CNN, for instance.

The mistake I made was losing control of the company. But I didn’t plan for that, just everything went wrong. But in a way, that was good, too, because I had had so much success for so long, and I didn’t get the big head, but I did perhaps overestimate just how much strength that I would have with the Time Warner merger. As long as it was just Time Warner, I had 7 or 8 percent of the company when I merged with Time Warner, but when we merged with AOL, I went down to 3 percent, and that is when they phased me out. I got laid off in a restructuring, but that’s okay.

I thought it was a no-brainer. It was something you could afford to do. It really doesn’t cost that much more to do twenty-four hours of news than it does two-and-a-half hours of news. You’ve got to have the news gathering organization. You have to have basically the same stories, but you need more stories and more different kinds of programs if you’re going to do twenty-four-hour news, unless you’re going to do something like Headline News, which is basically a half-hour rolling format that you tune in and out of, and you don’t expect somebody to stay with it more than a half an hour. But if you want people to have an opportunity to watch for extended periods of time, you need programs like Larry King Live and debate programs like what used to be Crossfire. You need financial reporting. You need extended sports reporting, if you’re going to do a good job. Basically, there’s a number of cable news networks now, but we were the only one in the beginning. I didn’t think it was hard to figure out how it should be formatted and what it should do. The main thing it was going to provide is news availability when people had a chance to watch it, rather than when the networks wanted people to watch it.

When I made the decision to do it, about a year before it went on the air, there was no question in my mind. Now the only question was: Would I run out of resources before it turned the corner? There was no way I could know about that until I went ahead and did it, because I didn’t have enough capital to see it through. But in my study of history, Erwin Rommel in the desert never had enough petrol for his offensives against the British to finish them. He had to depend on capturing fuel supplies from the British by attacking so quickly and catching them off guard that they would retreat and leave some petrol for him to finish. It was dicey, and it didn’t always work, but I knew that was what I was going to have to do. I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast. And that’s what we did: moved so fast that the networks wouldn’t have time to respond, because they should have done this, not me, but they didn’t have any imagination, or didn’t have adequate imagination.

It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I knew what was coming. We knew that the attack was coming imminently because we had been warned by the State Department. Even the president called the president of the network and strongly recommended that we get our people out of Baghdad, but I made the decision that—as long as they would volunteer to stay—that they could stay. We were freedom of the press, we were going to get the story. I was in Jane Fonda’s room. She was working, and I had the afternoon off. And it was about 5 or 6 P.M. East Coast time and 2 P.M. West Coast, and I was watching CNN and the war started. I flipped over to KCBS and Dan Rather was in the studio talking. And I flipped to NBC and Tom Brokaw was in the studio talking, and I flipped over to ABC and Peter Jennings was in the studio talking, and I flipped over to CNN, and the tracer bullets were going and the rockets were getting down, and I said “Yippie! This is the greatest scoop in the history of journalism!” And one network had the start of the war from behind enemy lines.

There probably are some ways that I work and live that might be a little different from other people you come across. For one thing, I go to great lengths to be efficient with my time and try to make the most of every minute of every day. When I run meetings, they start on time. A lot of that came from my father. For much of my career, I didn’t even waste time getting to and from work. There were long stretches when I spent most of my weeknights sleeping in my office, and later, when I could afford to, I built an apartment on the top floor of CNN. So when millions of Atlanta drivers were wasting their time sitting in traffic, my commute was nothing more than walking up a flight of stairs, and I had that much more productive time to work every day.

Another way I save time is by managing information efficiently. A lot of people become inundated with paper and e-mails, but I make a point to keep a clean desk. I never let things pile up. I couldn’t do this without a great executive assistant, and for the last twenty years, it’s been Debbie Masterson. She is invaluable, and in addition to keeping me on track and on schedule, I’ve always counted on her to screen out correspondence that I don’t need to see. The volume of mail I receive is tremendous—from business reports, solicitations, and so forth—but over 90 percent never makes it to my desk. For most requests, Debbie knows how to respond. The 10 percent that makes it to my desk still amounts to a lot and I try to answer it all that day so that I don’t get bogged down with unanswered messages.

Basically, I ran my company the same way I ran my boat. I found the best people I could to run our businesses while I stepped back to keep an eye on our overall strategy and what our next move should be. A lot of entrepreneurs and company founders have trouble leading as their company grows. Part of the problem is that they become so used to having their hands in everything when the company is small that they find it difficult to delegate successfully once the business gets big. I stayed on top of key issues relating to our individual businesses, but I let my managers manage. This gave me time to focus on the big picture.

Well, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you better get out there and hustle, because it’s tough out there. There’s a lot of other people trying to get to the top, too. So if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, and if you want to be a success in life, you better be prepared to work hard and be smart and think a lot, at least I think so. Unless you’re just a genius or you just are tremendously lucky. Every now and then, somebody wins the lottery with a two-dollar ticket, worth $20 million with a two-dollar ticket. You can do that. You can play the lottery, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I was inspired by the Rotary Club. My father was a Rotarian and I as a very young man in Macon, Georgia, was a Rotarian. The Rotary’s motto was, “He profits most who serves the best.” That was my motto through my life and it still is. I believe that. It worked for me. Just by being honest and having a lot of integrity saves you a lot of trouble. A lot of these businessmen who cut corners end up in jail, embarrassed and disgraced. I didn’t want that.

I was going to be honored as the man who made the greatest contributions to the UN that year in the United States, and I wanted to have something to say, and I figured that on my way to New York—I was waiting for the last minute to work on my speech. I said, “What are you going to say, Turner?” I said, “Well ...” because the United States was about a billion dollars in arrears. We hadn’t paid our debt for two years, and it was about a billion dollars. I said, “Well, why don’t you just give a billion dollars to the UN,” and I’ll just make up for what the United States didn’t pay. You know, step forward, like if your uncle doesn’t pay his bills down at the grocery store, you pay them for him. So that’s what I decided to do. I was worth three billion at the time, and I gave away over half of what I had, because I gave another half a billion to other causes, too.

It’s hard, very hard. But when I merged with Time Warner, I didn’t think there was any way they could squeeze me out but when they merged with AOL I was diluted down to where they could and they did. I took a chance and I lost. Hardly anybody wins all the time. I’ve won more than most, so I’m not going to complain about it. I’ve pretty much gotten over it, but it still hurts. I’m trying to be a good sport about it. I’m not crying. I’m out at the UN working and helping and I started a new restaurant business with a partner and I’m really proud of that.

The television business was relatively easy. There are no barriers to entry in the restaurant business so everybody with $200,000 and a kitchen can be a restaurateur. I mean it’s tough. But I wanted to do something tough, and I want to be a success in the restaurant business because the television business was relatively easy because the barriers to entry were very high. At the time I came into it there were only three people in it: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So there was an unmet need for competition. I used to say I spent a lot of time trying to kick the networks and what did I have to show for it after ten years: broken toes.