Ted Turner

"In March 1993, I flew to New York to meet François Gille, the multilingual managing director of Crédit Lyonnais, which now reluctantly owned MGM. After a leisurely conversation about the south of France and our mutual love of the region’s cuisine, we turned to the studio. Gille had met with eight leading investment banks. All offered the same advice: to deal with its $3.2 billion in troubled entertainment assets, the bank should break up MGM, lay off its 2,400 employees, and sell what assets were left, mainly the lion logo and sister studio United Artists’s 1,100-title film library. (MGM’s library already belonged to Ted Turner, and Lorimar already owned the famous studio lot.) On paper, that course seemed prudent, as the studio was burning through a million bucks a day. Total liquidation could shave the bank’s losses to $900 million. I said, “I have a different point of view. I think you should put another $150 million into MGM so it can start distributing movies again.” “And why would that be best?” “Because your bank wants to open branches in New York and do more business in America. It would be terrible public relations to fire more than a thousand Americans and plow the MGM name underground for good.” After letting that point sink in, I said, “I believe I can get you most of your money back, if not all of it.” CAA could jump-start the studio with a few movie packages, which would buy the French time to revive UA’s tent-pole franchises: Rocky, the Pink Panther, James Bond. New production would boost the older titles’ value. When Crédit Lyonnais eventually sold MGM, as required by the feds, it would get a much better price. Gille said, “No one else agrees with you.” I stayed impassive, but my heart leaped. In any multiplayer contest, you want to be the outlier. I told Gille, “Everyone you’ve met with is in the business of selling assets. But I’m in the business of building assets, and I think you are, too.” “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said."

"TCI had a new worry: we’d be held hostage to ever-increasing fees from networks that attracted the biggest audiences. This changed the economic model in my mind, and in an instant I saw our big distribution company differently. We would have to become owners of content. Quality programming was critical for the industry, and I understood most content providers were price constrained, which is why we stepped up for Ted Turner and why we invested in BET, Discovery, and the Family Channel."

"His issues with Uncle Sam notwithstanding, what I know is that Mike Milken proved his thesis that non-investment-grade bonds were undervalued relative to investment-grade bonds. And he helped TCI raise a lot of money perfectly legally, just as he had done with Ted Turner and many other U.S. companies. After we started dealing with Milken, we didn’t have to do as many road shows anymore."

"While I don’t socialize much with most business colleagues, Ted and I became fast friends, and over the years we’ve hiked, hunted, fished, and flown together. And here’s the funny part: Ted Turner and I are as different as two people could possibly be. I am an introvert, and I am quiet—for the most part—at meetings. Public speaking for me can be a mild form of punishment. But Ted has the intensity of a revival preacher when he believes in something, pacing the room and occasionally quoting Shakespeare or Alexander the Great to annunciate his points."

"I found a lifelong friend in Ted Turner, a funny and fearless maverick who created a new “Superstation” to compete with the Big Three broadcast networks, which had held a lock on over 90 percent of viewers since television was invented. It was Ted who taught me one of the most enduring lessons in my life: about the power of wealth to do good in society and the absolute necessity to save this planet, specifically the most beautiful open spaces in this country."

"Each moment was classic Ted Turner: total transparency, not a single emotion or thought held back. This man shared everything in real time, and then some. And he did it regardless of whether you were looking to hear his thoughts. This made me admire Ted’s daring escapades even more. There was no stopping him."

"I’d like to think I played an important role in helping Ted Turner build a fledgling local TV station into a media juggernaut worth nearly $8 billion, but the fact is Ted played just as large a role in my own career and life. Of the hundreds of people I have done business with, Ted Turner stands out as one of the most driven, iconoclastic, irrepressible, hilarious, unrelenting, and visionary leaders I ever have encountered."

"None of us had ever met Ted Turner, and all we really knew about him was what we had heard and read. Ted Turner was from Atlanta, and his nicknames hinted that this was no wallflower: “Captain Outrageous” and “Mouth of the South.”"

"Ted Turner called me a few times to say he wanted to get in, insisting I should do this with him instead of those other people. “They won’t have your interests at heart. I will,” he told me. One night, when we were both scheduled to attend a charity cable event, he called me from his suite at the Waldorf Towers, where he and Jane Fonda (his wife at the time) were staying. “Why don’t you come down and we’ll talk before we have to go to the dinner?” I didn’t think there was any way for him to participate, but he was adamant, so I went down to his suite. Ted began stalking around the room, shouting, “You’ve had bad parenting. All the people you’ve worked for were bad parents, and you should be with a good parent. I’m a good parent and you’re a battered child.” Periodically, I’d look at Jane cross-eyed. She could see his rants and parenting rap weren’t exactly resonating with me, and she tried to get Ted to sit down and shut up. He finally ran out of steam, and we went off to the dinner, never to discuss it again."

"(Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, B.C. Forbes, Ted Turner)"

"William McGowan was able to launch MCI to compete with AT&T. Ted Turner was able to create Turner Broadcasting. Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised through the sale of junk bonds and used to build new companies."

"subscribers]. It was hard to overpay for cable because revenues were constantly going up. HBO was going up on the satellite, Ted Turner was adding content, and court decisions were going our way. So revenue was going up fifteen or twenty percent a year regularly. You could add a channel and raise [monthly] rates by a dollar and do it again the next year and raise rates again.""