Ted Turner was never one to soften a forecast, even when the subject was himself.
“At 75, how much longer will I live? Till 80 maybe?” the CNN founder told Fortune‘s Pattie Sellers in a wide-ranging 2013 interview marking his 75th birthday. When Sellers pushed back—why not 90?—Turner allowed it was “a possibility,” but said he was “talking about practically.” It was, he explained, why he wouldn’t start anything new: “75 is too late to be starting new ventures. Particularly ones that take many years to reach fruition. I wouldn’t want to start anything without having a reasonable chance of seeing it be successful before I die or am incapacitated.”
Turner died Wednesday at 87, according to a statement from Turner Enterprises—nearly a decade past the deadline he’d given himself, and just shy of the milestone he’d half-dismissed.
He spent those bonus years much as he’d spent the decade before: warning anyone who would listen that humanity was running out of time. The man who built the first 24-hour news network, who put $1 billion into the United Nations Foundation, who created an eco-focused Saturday morning cartoon called Captain Planet, and who co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with former Senator Sam Nunn, used his late-life platform to sound an unrelenting alarm about nuclear weapons, climate change, and overpopulation.
In 2003, Turner told Fortune he believed the chances were “50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years.” A decade later, sitting in his Atlanta office with a freshly installed pacemaker, he wasn’t backing off. “Fifty years aren’t up yet,” he told Sellers. “I’d say that’s generally the case. The nuclear threat is the most imminent threat. But global climate change and environmental destruction of the earth and our resource base, that’s the other great threat.”
His prescription for the population problem was characteristically Turner: blunt and slightly impolitic, but impossible to ignore. He wanted the world to drop from [then] roughly 7 billion people to 2.5 billion, achieved voluntarily through family planning. He told Sellers he had encouraged his own five children—and 13 grandchildren—to have fewer kids of their own.
On faith, he was equally direct. Turner had drifted from the Christianity of his youth after watching his sister Mary Jean suffer and die at 17. By 75, he called himself agnostic, though he still offered up what he called “mini-prayers” for sick friends. “If God’s going to save us, it’s time for him to show up,” he told Fortune. “We’re not showing evidence that we’re ready to save ourselves. That’s what bothers me.”
Turner’s media legacy
The 2013 interview also captured Turner taking stock of his media legacy with the candor of a man who figured he didn’t have time to be diplomatic. He called the AOL-Time Warner merger an outright “disaster” (he lost $8 billion when the stock plummeted), lamented the planned spin-off of Time Inc., and predicted that Time Warner, without him, had been shortsighted compared to Rupert Murdoch, who had held on to his sports and news properties. “They might as well rename it Turner Broadcasting,” he said of what was left.
His verdict on Murdoch himself? The same one he’d delivered to Fortune a decade earlier: “the most dangerous man in the world.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “But he’s getting too old.” Murdoch, now 95, outlived him.
Asked in 2013 what he was proudest of, Turner named his children first and CNN second—though he noted, with a flicker of the old showman, that the Cartoon Network actually beat CNN in the ratings most days. “We like to laugh,” he said. “If you get people laughing, there’s a good chance you’ll win them over. Very seldom do people kill somebody when they’re laughing. And there’s plenty of killing going on now.”
He never did start that next big venture. He stuck with what he had: 2 million acres, 55,000 bison, a restaurant chain called Ted’s Montana Grill, and philanthropy. By the time of the 2013 interview, he had paid $973 million of the $1 billion he’d pledged to the U.N. He kept funding the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and kept buying solar.
The five-year horizon he’d given himself in 2013 came and went. So did 80. So did 85. The warnings kept coming.
Read Fortune‘s full 2013 interview with Ted Turner here: Ted Turner at 75
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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