Ted Turner died today, 6 May 2026.His CNN was the first 24 hour news channel, which was quite the cultural shift. Suddenly news was something reported on all the time rather than just at day's end. At that point in history fewer people had any time to make history because they were spending so much time trying to keep up with daily news.
The Turner quotes that have entered general circulation tend to be his more aphoristic ones: "I am too rich to talk to. I'm a billionaire." "Sports is like a war without the killing."
What stuck with me, though, was a story he told about becoming a billionaire and how anticlimactic that was. At first he was excited about it but realized he couldn't exactly call his friends with the news. "Hey! I'm rich! Far richer than you!" So he called his wife who simply said something like, "Good for you. Does this mean you can come home early to help with the kids?"
He gave away a third of his net worth to the United Nations in 1997, before the giving pledge made such philanthropy fashionable. He took the position that money was how the game was scored but not what made life worth living.
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