![]() of AOL, who was to be the chairman of the new company, demanding that he not be deprived of supervision of CNN and the other cable networks that he had started. Turner protested, in a series of calls first to Levin, then to Steve Case, the C.E.O. “I said, ‘This is the way we need to run the company.’” “I didn’t fire Ted,” Levin insists today. As Turner recalls, Levin went on to say, “Sorry, Ted, but you lose your vice-chairman title as well.” According to Levin, Turner offered to give up his vice-chairmanship in order to keep running the Turner Broadcasting division, which included CNN, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, the TBS Superstation, the Cartoon Network, the New Line Cinema studio, the Atlanta Braves baseball team, the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team, and Time Warner’s HBO. “You can’t report to Pittman, so you have to have a more senior role,” Levin remembers telling Turner. Turner Broadcasting would no longer report to Turner but, rather, to Robert Pittman, the chief operating officer of AOL. of Time Warner, who told Turner what Turner had often told others: the company was going to reorganize. The news, Turner says, was delivered during a telephone call from Gerald Levin, the C.E.O. Less than four months later, Ted Turner was fired. But when, in January of 2000, Time Warner and Turner agreed to join with the Internet company America Online, Turner was not invited to participate in the talks about how the merged company would function. His influence at the world’s largest media company was pervasive he played the role of crazy-uncle-in-the-basement whose large appetite for cost-cutting has to be appeased, and in the process he helped revive the company’s stock. Ted Turner’s business successes didn’t end when, in 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner. ![]() His life is documented by the framed magazine covers that crowd the walls of his Atlanta office: Turner in 1976, launching the first “Superstation,” by transforming a weak local television signal into a robust cable network Turner in 1977, skippering his boat, Courageous, to victory in the America’s Cup Turner pioneering the purchase of professional sports teams as cheap and reliable programming Turner inventing the twenty-four-hour Cable News Network Turner buying Hollywood film libraries to create new cable-television networks Turner as Time’s Man of the Year. He was the largest shareholder in AOL Time Warner, owning around four per cent of the soon-to-be-merged companies his celebrated name was on the door of a major division, Turner Broadcasting System and his dimpled chin, gap-toothed smile, and pencil-thin Gable-esque mustache were recognizable everywhere. “He wants to get into Heaven.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller / SabaĮarly last year, Ted Turner seemed invincible. “For some reason, he has a guilty conscience,” Jane Fonda says. ![]()
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