Ted Turner, 1938–2026

There are men who build companies, and then there are men who build entire categories of human experience. Ted Turner, who died on May 6 at the age of 87, was decidedly the latter. The founder of CNN and the architect of modern cable television, Turner took a grief-stricken young man’s billboard inheritance and turned it, over the course of roughly three decades of volcanic ambition, into the most consequential media empire of the 20th century.

Robert Edward Turner III was born on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family relocated to Savannah, Georgia, where his father was building a billboard business. Turner enrolled at Brown University in 1956 but was expelled for sneaking a coed into his dormitory room. He returned to Georgia to work in the family’s billboard operation — a detour that would eventually lead to everything.

Turner was just 24 when his father died