Ted Turner, Who Dared Fellow Billionaires to Give, Dies at 87

The outspoken media mogul Ted Turner, who ushered in the era of ten-figure gifts in 1997 when he pledged $1 billion to support United Nations’ worldwide charitable projects, has died. He had suffered from the progressive brain disorder Lewy body dementia for many years. He died on Wednesday at his home in Lamont, Fla.

Turner’s billion-dollar pledge created the United Nations Foundation, which supports international humanitarian, economic, environmental, and other programs led by the U.N. The money also launched the Better World Fund, which supports the Better World Campaign, an effort to strengthen ties between the United States and the U.N. Turner, whose wealth came from his cable television and land holdings, paid off the pledge in 2015.

A billion-dollar gift from an individual donor was a rarity when Turner announced the U.N. donation nearly 30 years ago. That would soon change. In 2000, Bill Gates and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, pledged $5 billion to their Gates Foundation, and in 2001 Gordon and Betty Moore gave $5.8 billion to their Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Other wealthy donors followed. The financier Warren Buffett pledged roughly $36 billion to the Gates Foundation in 2006, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos committed $10 billion to launch his Bezos Earth Fund in 2020.

Since 2000, two dozen donors have given single donations of $1 billion or more, according to data from the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 reports, with philanthropists such as Bill Gates, Buffett, and Bezos giving multiple gifts of $1 billion or more.

Turner had a hand in the creation of what would eventually become the Philanthropy 50 as well. In 1996, he proposed ranking the richest Americans, not by their wealth but by their giving. He said at the time that he thought it would spur more philanthropy and shame rich people who he thought were not giving enough of their wealth to help others.

“These new super-rich won’t loosen up their wads because they’re afraid they’ll reduce their net worth and go down on the [Forbes 400] list,” Turner told the New York Times that year.

The online publication Slate started the list in 1996, and in 2000, the Chronicle took it over, partnering with Slate in the early years. Turner continued to encourage wealthy people to give big when he signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, the year the pledge’s founders, Gates, French Gates, and Buffett, launched the effort to persuade the world’s wealthiest people to commit to give at least half of their fortunes to charity either during their lifetimes or when they die.

Multigenerational Philanthropy

The U.N. pledge brought Turner a lot of attention, but the father of five had other charitable interests that grew out of a deep concern about the future of the planet, and he devoted large sums to environmental and conservation programs throughout his lifetime.

He co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit that works on preventing nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, with former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn in 2001. He pledged up to $250 million in stock over five years to back the effort but ended up giving $74 million to the organization when the value of his AOL-Time Warner stock declined sharply in 2003.

Before creating the NTI, Turner established several conservation nonprofits in the 1990s. He co-founded the Captain Planet Foundation, which works to engage children in protecting the environment, and the Turner Endangered Species Fund and Turner Biodiversity, which seek to ensure the planet’s biological diversity by protecting wildlife and habitats.

He launched the environmentally focused Turner Foundation with a $2.5 million donation in 1990 to support a range of environmental causes, including the protection of land and wildlife, programs aimed at boosting renewable energy practices that avoid harming wildlife, and efforts to increase diversity within the conservation movement. The foundation has given out grants totaling about $400 million since 1991.

He told the Chronicle in 2008 that one of the reasons he started the foundation was to get his children involved in philanthropy. All five serve on the foundation’s Board of Directors, as do several of his grandchildren.

Turner had a difficult relationship with his own father, an alcoholic who often beat him, but he credited the man with teaching him about the importance of charitable giving.

“Not only did he make contributions to causes that he cared about, he also supported the tuition of two African American students at his alma mater, Millsaps College, in the late 1950s,” Turner wrote of his father in his Giving Pledge letter. ” It made a big impression on me to see someone as hard-charging as my father take the time to quietly help out two young people like this.”

Ivy League to Coast Guard to Business

Turner grew up well-off in Savannah, Ga. His father, Robert Edward Turner II, founded the billboard company Turner Outdoor Advertising, and his parents sent him to a private boarding school and then to Brown University, where he studied classics and economics.

The gregarious and brash Turner was active in university extracurriculars, serving as vice president of Brown’s debating union and as captain of the sailing team. He spent three years at Brown before he was expelled in 1959, when university officials learned he was living with a girlfriend, a violation of university policy. The university recognized his successes as a philanthropist and businessman in 1989, awarding him with an honorary degree.

After his expulsion, Turner joined the U.S. Coast Guard. He returned home to lead the family business after his father committed suicide in 1963. He renamed the company Turner Broadcasting and in time built a substantial portfolio of cable television news and entertainment stations, including CNN — the first 24-hour cable television news network — the Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies, and the television and film production companies Castle Rock Entertainment and New Line Cinema.

Turner’s wealth soared and then tumbled as the media landscape changed in the 1990s. He sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock in 1996 and then faced losses when Time Warner merged with AOL in the early 2000s, around the time the dot-com bubble was bursting. The value of the company’s stock fell, and in 2003 Turner left the company. He then turned to other ventures and continued focusing on his philanthropy.

Ted Turner will be remembered for many things: His influence on cable news with the founding of CNN, his brash manner (he was nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” at one point), his many marriages (including his third, to actor Jane Fonda), and his occasional controversial comments — he once said the United States should adopt China’s one-child policy.

The nonprofit world, however, will remember him most for his billion-dollar gift establishing the United Nations Foundation and for how that donation ushered in the era of billion-dollar gifts. “Looking back, if I had to live my life over, there are things I would do differently, but the one thing I would not change is my charitable giving,” Turner wrote in his Giving Pledge letter. “I’m particularly thankful for my father’s advice to set goals so high that they can’t possibly be achieved during a lifetime and to give help where help is needed most.”