Ted Turner passed away at 87. Bill Brioux says he was a yachtsman who won the America’s Cup, a broadcaster who turned small TV stations into a media empire, and a conservationist who ended up owning more than two million acres and 45,000 bison.

The MGM library purchase in the eighties was the move that made everything else possible. He paid $1.5 billion, kept all the films, and used that content to launch Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network, which ran on the Hanna Barbera and Warner Brothers library he now controlled. CNN came out of Atlanta and changed how news was distributed globally.

Bill Brioux traces the later years too: an AOL Time Warner merger that did not go well, attempts to buy Paramount and Warner’s back, and a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, the same condition that affected Robin Williams, which defined his final decade. His nickname was the Mouth of the South. His ex-wife Jane Fonda called him her favourite ex-husband.

Topics: Ted Turner, CNN founder, MGM library, Turner Classic Movies, conservationism

GUEST: Bill Brioux | brioux.tv

Originally aired on2026-05-06