"His father didn't take him. When Ed Turner Jr. - a Cincinnati billboard magnate with untreated bipolar disorder and a heavy hand - went off to a Navy posting on the Gulf Coast, he took his wife and daughter and left young Ted at a boarding school back in Ohio. The drive to prove his worth, by Turner's own later admission, began there."
"Turner spent his life making bets others thought were unreasonable. The arc - billboard prince, cable cowboy, bison rancher - runs from a boarding-school dormitory in Cincinnati to two million acres of American West."
"In 1997, Ted Turner's advisors told him the United Nations could not legally accept private donations. He gave them forty-eight hours to find a way around it. Then he wrote the UN a check for $1 billion - the largest individual philanthropic gift in history at the time. He had decided he would rather embarrass Congress than die rich."
Ted Turner, who died at 87, built a legacy spanning cable news, restaurants, and restored Western lands. Abandoned at boarding school by his father, Turner developed a lifelong drive to prove himself. After his father's suicide in 1963, Turner took control of the family billboard business and refused to let a failing sale close. He expanded Turner Outdoor Advertising into the Southeast's largest billboard firm by 1970, then mortgaged his house to purchase a struggling Atlanta UHF television station. Turner consistently made unconventional bets others deemed unreasonable, culminating in his 1997 decision to donate $1 billion to the United Nations—the largest individual philanthropic gift in history at that time—after instructing advisors to find legal workarounds within forty-eight hours.
Read at 24/7 Wall St.
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]