Hello, and welcome to another installment of Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story. Here’s our thesis for today: The greatest entrepreneurs rarely build safe businesses. More often, they build companies around ideas that initially sound unreasonable. Few entrepreneurs understood, let alone embodied, that notion better than Ted Turner, the founder of CNN who died yesterday at age 87.

As David Lidsky observes, Turner should be more people’s favorite founder (or at least one of them)—and yet, for some reason, Turner is often underrated. That’s a shame, because his legacy stacks up favorably against most of the truly great innovators of the modern era. David’s argument: Turner didn't just transform one industry—he reshaped several. From inventing the 24-hour news cycle to changing sports broadcasting and helping pioneer the modern media era, Turner built his career on seeing opportunity where others saw risk. 

At the time, many of his biggest bets looked excessive, expensive, or outright impossible. But that's exactly the point. Founders who leave the biggest mark are often the ones willing to move before consensus forms around the opportunity and Turner’s career is a testament to that. 

In this piece, you’ll learn: 

“I usually know what I want to do, and you have to have confidence in your own ideas.” 

BY DAVID LIDSKY, HEAD OF EDITORIAL STRATEGY

Ted Turner changed the TV business, the movie industry, the news business, and professional sports. As if that weren’t enough, he also helped give birth to the space economy, mainstreaming the commercial use of satellite transmission for media.

He did all this with such fearlessness and brio that he became a folk hero in his time. It’s a legacy that’s somewhat forgotten, because Turner merged his company with Time Warner in 1995 and then it was effectively acquired by AOL in 2000. Between that deal’s infamy and Turner’s retreat from the spotlight before his death, he isn’t routinely cited or seemingly revered by today’s founders, who often look to history for inspiration and ideas. That’s a shame, as Turner should be as idolized as Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, or Estée Lauder.

To rectify this, I asked Web Barr, founder of Hi Barr, a media company focused on in-depth storytelling from the history of popular culture from 1960 to 2010, for help. Barr has just completed one of the most ambitious attempts to tell Turner’s story in his podcast series Media Moguls, which he hosts. In 11 episodes and over 30 hours, “The Ted Turner Saga” charts Turner’s astonishing career from 1963 to 2000. “He was part of the three biggest media deals in history,” says Barr of one of the boldest founders and innovators ever to play the entrepreneurial game.

Here are five maxims Turner lived by, along with a contemporary founder who exudes part of Turner’s ethos. Ever wonder what Reed Hastings’s Netflix strategy, which disrupted Hollywood, Elon Musk’s bold pronouncements, and Dave Portnoy’s signature media move for Barstool owe to Turner? Read on. If everyone had as much fun as Turner did building his business, we’d all be better off.

Turner’s father, Ed Turner Jr., built an outdoor advertising business worth millions by the time he was 50.

Ed told Ted, “Son, you be sure to set your goals so high that you can’t possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way, you always have something ahead of you. I set my own goals too low, and now I’m having a hard time coming up with new ones.”

He died by suicide at age 53, and Ted Turner wouldn’t make the same mistake as his father.

Barr: “What Ted gives founders—or anyone, really—permission to do is chase the biggest possible dream. And if you’re going to go for it, go all in. Go to the fullest extent and build the world you want to be in, build the company you want to build, and don’t apologize for it.”

Modern example: Elon Musk has stated almost from the beginning of SpaceX in the early 2000s that his ambition has been to send humans to Mars. Musk’s timelines to do so—in 2016, he promised this would happen by 2024—have led skeptics to mock him. But what if the Mars goal is merely Musk embracing the same idea that Turner took from his father?

“We were the little guys fighting for our lives against some unknown big guys,” said Erwin Mazzo, Turner’s accountant. “That made everything seem a lot more important than it probably was.”

Turner was masterful at giving his teams something to compete against, the better to inspire in everyone the belief that “we can’t afford to do things like everybody else,” as he said. “We’ve got to do things differently.”

In the billboard business, that rival didn’t really exist. But as Turner got into TV, he was up against the networks. When he bought the Atlanta Braves, it was the Major League Baseball establishment. In 1985, Turner launched a daring takeover attempt of CBS, the storied network known for its prestige programming and establishment credibility — exactly the kind of institution Turner loved to challenge.

Barr: “He needed a villain. Not a villain, but a competitor, something to surpass or surmount. He always needed something, and that’s the sailing in him.” (On top of being an entrepreneur and media mogul, Turner was a world-class sailor, winning the America’s Cup in 1977.)

Modern example: Larry Ellison, also a world-class sailor, and winner of the America’s Cup in 2010 and 2013. Ellison’s Oracle has long defined itself against Microsoft and Google, even when it wasn’t really competing against either company directly. Neither ever had the database business that’s Oracle’s core, but no matter.

Turner built what became TBS by licensing old TV shows that studios didn’t believe had any value. But as people caught on and prices rose, he realized that he needed to control his own destiny. He bought the Atlanta Braves in 1976, giving him hundreds of hours of sports programming he controlled. A year later, Turner bought the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, giving him another 82 games and hundreds of hours he could rely on. This was well before the boom in sports rights, when the conventional wisdom was not to make all the games available on TV because the money was in attendance.

In the 1980s, well before old movies were seen as valuable intellectual property, Turner bought MGM’s film library, giving him more than 3,500 movies (a whopping 35 percent of every movie ever made at that time). Widely believed to have overpaid at the time, that deal did put Turner in precarious debt at first, but it paid off in time. “How can you go broke buying the Rembrandts of the programming business?” Turner said of the classic films he now owned, such as The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca.

That library allowed him to build the cable networks TNT and TCM, and those films are still part of Warner Bros.’ crown jewels that were hotly contested between Netflix and Paramount in the past year.

Barr: “Ted was no stranger to buying, let’s call them, distressed properties and cutting favorable deals, even when it frustrated his advisors to the point they quit. But Ted Turner also understood TV rights better than most. [A deal like buying the Braves] was a matter of life and death.”

Modern example: Reed Hastings had to license content from studios for Netflix’s DVD rental service and its streamer. But with Netflix’s Hollywood rivals seeing that they could demand more and more of the insurgent, Hastings (and now co-CEO Ted Sarandos) started to make their own original TV series and movies. That way Netflix, too, could control its destiny, even if it meant overpaying in the near term, to ensure its long-term survival.

Turner didn’t have the nickname Mouth of the South for nothing (a moniker he hated). But he knew that if you put him in front of microphones and cameras, he’d deliver. In his pre-internet heyday, the press conference was his specialty. Not only would he be able to draw a crowd, but he’d inevitably make news. That meant that his rivals—the traditional networks—would often cover him pointedly critiquing their very businesses. He’d use their own airwaves against them.

“Deep down, I knew our bid [for CBS] was a long shot, but so was just about everything else in my career,” Turner later said. “Between legal and banking fees, the whole venture would cost us about $20 million [about $61 million today], but the way I saw it, we were getting at least that much value back in publicity, and in the process we were tying one of our major competitors in knots trying to fend us off.”

Barr: “He knew what worked. We will have a press conference, and we will tell everybody what we’re going to do. I think delivering those was very effective in a way that, similar to Steve Jobs delivering keynotes, he could get his case out there because, oh, here’s Ted Turner. And he might say something crazy, which very often he did.”

Modern example: The problem with most of the people who take their message directly to their audience, unfiltered by the media, is that they’re not terribly likable, or at least not nearly as charismatic and quotable as Turner. But Barstool founder Dave Portnoy and his propensity for “emergency press conferences,” online videos often reacting to news or controversies relating to him or Barstool, are a social updating of what worked so well for Turner.

The number of times Turner effectively bet it all is too numerous to detail, but it started when he fought to reclaim his father’s business after he died in 1963. Turner, 24, had 90 days to raise $200,000 (more than $2 million in today’s dollars) or lose it all. He got employees to buy stock in the company, he sold off real estate holdings, and he took out lines of credit. Whatever it took. Because he knew what his father couldn’t accept: The billboard advertising business generated so much free cash flow that he could handle the company’s debt.

Turner would do this again and again. Things were going so poorly with his second TV station in Charlotte in the early 1970s, he hosted an on-air “beg-a-thon” to raise funds from viewers. Launching CNN in 1980—24-hour news at a time when TV news was 30 minutes a night—almost bankrupted him.

“Where’s the fun in making a bunch of studies?” Turner said. “I usually know what I want to do, and you have to have confidence in your own ideas. I never did study on CNN, which is going to cost me every penny I’ve got. Actually, we did do one on that. It cost me $4,000 [$18,000 in 2026 dollars], down in Sarasota, Florida. But that was just for advertising. If everybody in that survey said they hated the idea, I wouldn’t have given a damn.”

Barr: “Just think of the audacity. In hindsight, it’s all just so preposterous that it worked out. Numerous times, they almost went out of business. Not once, not twice, it was countless.”

Modern example: When Travis Kalanick was building Uber, as successful as its rideshare business was, he kept finding other bets that forced him to succeed or potentially crash the business. In 2014 alone, he launched what became Uber Eats, entered the cutthroat Chinese ride-hailing market, and made a huge push into developing a self-driving vehicle. Any of them could have killed the company, but his $2 billion investment in China turned into an almost $8 billion stake in his Chinese rival in just two years after the two merged, and Uber’s delivery business now makes up 33 percent of Uber’s revenue and is its fastest-growing business segment. Kalanick’s successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, sold off Uber’s autonomous efforts, but in the wake of Waymo’s success, that move now looks short-sighted.

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