Ted Turner

From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.

Ted Turner, lovingly known as "The Mouth of the South," is an eccentric gazillionaire, noted buffalo afficionado, and for some reason, the husband of former movie star and popular NRA target Jane Fonda.

Turner rose to fame in the late '70s as the manager of Atlanta station WTBS, which he bootstrapped from a penny-ante local station to a penny-ante cable station with little more than paper clips, finger puppets, and endless reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. He founded 24-hour cable news network CNN in 1981, convinced that the world suffered from a dearth of scrolling news tickers. In the early '90s, already a billionaire after his lucrative sale of "Scud Stud" Arthur Kent to a private breeding facility for future news anchors, he became a gazillionaire by selling his vast Turner Enterprises empire to Time Warner.

Since resigning from Time Warner's board after realizing that his contract no longer included the mandatory bootlicking clause he'd grown accustomed to, Turner has devoted himself to various increasingly eccentric pursuits. He raises acres and acres of buffalo on a Montana ranch for unspecified purposes; in a 1998 interview, he told a Fortune reporter, "I just like to roll around in them, you know, in a great big pile." More commendably, in 2000 Turner donated $2 billion to the United Nations, where it was promptly squandered on oversized pie charts and vanity diplomatic plates.

Turner is also the only man wealthy and courageous enough to tempt the wrath of Rupert Murdoch. He has been known to charter a private helicopter into the smoking, wasted heart of Murdoch's Australian empire, risking life and limb, solely to leave a flaming bag of dog poop at Murdoch's unholy doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run away giggling.