Ted Turner Dead at 87: Meet His Five Children

Ted Turner, the man who invented 24-hour news, turned a failing Atlanta TV station into a media empire, and never once stopped talking, has died. He was 87. The CNN founder passed away peacefully on Wednesday, May 6, surrounded by family at his home in Tallahassee, Florida, leaving behind five children, 14 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren — and a legacy that reshaped how the world watches television.

Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav paid tribute in a statement Wednesday. “In 1980, many questioned the logic of launching CNN,” Zaslav said. “Ted believed the world deserved access to news as it happened, and he acted on that conviction. CNN fundamentally changed how the world experiences history in real time.”

Turner had been living with Lewy body dementia since his diagnosis in September 2018. The progressive brain disorder, which affects both memory and physical function, had no treatment that could slow its course. He died without a publicly confirmed cause, but the illness had been a part of his life for nearly eight years.

The Man Behind the Empire

Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on November 19, 1938, and moved with his family to Savannah, Georgia, when he was nine. His father ran one of the most successful billboard advertising companies in the South — and when his father died by suicide in 1963, a 24-year-old Ted inherited the business and immediately started pushing it further than anyone expected.

He built it into a profitable regional powerhouse, then used those earnings to buy a struggling UHF television station in Atlanta in 1969 — WJRJ-TV, which he’d eventually rename WTBS. Most people saw a money pit. Turner saw a launching pad.

His real stroke of genius came in the mid-1970s, when he uplinked WTBS to a satellite, making it the first “superstation” — a local channel that cable systems across the country could carry. It was a move that bypassed the traditional network structure entirely and rewrote the rules of television distribution. Turner himself described the urgency of those early days: “I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast, and that’s what we did,” he said, per PBS. “Move so fast that the networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me, but they didn’t have the imagination.”

In 1980, he launched the Cable News Network — CNN — the first 24-hour television news channel in history. He financed it himself after selling a TV station he owned in North Carolina, based on a proposal from Reese Schoenfeld, who became CNN’s first president. TNT followed in 1988, Turner Classic Movies in 1994, and Cartoon Network filled out what became one of the most recognizable media portfolios in the world.

He was outspoken in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine now. When Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, Turner famously declared that CNN would “crush Rupert Murdoch like a bug.” He won the America’s Cup — twice — earning him the nickname “Captain Outrageous” to go alongside his more famous moniker, “The Mouth of the South.” He owned the Atlanta Braves during their World Series win. He became the largest individual landowner in the United States, eventually accumulating roughly 2 million acres across eight states. And in 1997, he pledged $1 billion — $100 million a year for 10 years — to United Nations causes, one of the largest philanthropic commitments in American history at the time.

He stepped away from the television business for good in 2006 when he retired from the Time Warner board of directors.

He once said, with the self-awareness he was rarely credited for: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”

Three Marriages, Five Children

Turner was married and divorced three times. His most famous marriage was his third — to Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda, whom he wed in 1991. They divorced in 2001 after a decade together. At the time of his death, he was not remarried.

He leaves behind five children. His son Beauregard Turner has followed in his father’s environmental footsteps, founding the Beau Turner Youth Conservation Center, an organization dedicated to connecting children with nature and wildlife. Beau also serves on the boards of several wildlife and environmental protection organizations — a cause Ted himself championed throughout his later years through the Turner Foundation and his vast land holdings.

According to NPR, Turner is survived by all five of his children, along with 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His estate, estimated by Forbes at $2.8 billion, now passes to his family — a fortune built from a billboard company, a failing TV station, and a refusal to hear the word “no.”