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Any list of legends of US companies should include Ted Turner's name. Audacious and often controversial, Turner was very disruptive at its peak. But time and age put him in an atmosphere of reflection, as Ted Koppel, a senior associate, discovered when he visited Turner on his Montana ranch:
You need a wide lens on your camera to capture the many facets of Ted Turner, especially on his vast 113,000-hectare ranch outside Bozeman, Montana.
Gathering horses, Koppel asked Turner, "Have you ridden all your property here?"
"No, but I did not hurt," he replied.
"You've always been a bit dreamy, is not it?"
"Well, many of my dreams have come true!"
Ted Koppel and Ted Turner are riding in Montana's Turner Ranch.
CBS News
"60 Minutes" covers the fulfillment of Turner's dreams for nearly 40 years. In 1979, Harry Reasoner made the following observation about Turner: "He is just convinced that he can do whatever he has decided to do.
At this point, Ted Turner had not yet created CNN. But he had bought the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, and by transmitting all of these baseball and satellite basketball games to the country's cable channels, Turner turned his local Atlanta TV, WTBS, into a "super station" ".
"Programming – you know we have the best of any independent station," he said in an advertisement for TBS.
At about the same time, Turner, a man of several parts, had already passed the Courageous sailboat to Australia in the 4-0 Coupe, arguably the most prestigious sailing race in the world.
"I'm very different, if you did not know it now," Turner told Reasoner. "I am a multi-faceted person, I have a lot of personalities, you should see me at midnight on a full moon!"
By the time Diane Sawyer arrived at Turner in 1986, CNN was well established and Turner intended to acquire CBS.
Sawyer asked him: "What happened to the man who said that CBS was" a cheap home run supported by evil artists? "
"I said years ago," he said. "I was more of a crusader than I am now, but I really felt like that at the time."
Ted Turner was a practitioner convinced of political misunderstanding for years before Donald Trump mounted this pony at the White House.
In 1986, he gave a speech in which he said: "The Italians! The Italians! Imagine the Italians at war." What a joke! They did not even belong to the last war. They were sorry for it. participate in it! They were happy they prefer to be involved in crimes and just make wine and have a good time! "
They called it "Mouth of the South" and "Captain Outrageous". But when Turner met Mike Wallace in 2003, CNN was already an international powerhouse, and Turner had started putting his money where he had it.
"I received a letter saying that the United Nations Association was going to name me the man of the year." And I thought to myself: what am I going to say? make a little speech. "
And since the money speaks …
"I said: Give them a lot of money." & # 39; How much will you give them? & # 39; I said, "It must be in the newspapers, it must be a big number, why not a billion, you know?"
And he did it!
Turner has fulfilled his $ 1 billion promise to the United Nations. It also contributed somewhere in the north of $ 250 million to limiting the spread of nuclear weapons outside the former Soviet Union.
As Morley Safer discovered in 2008, Turner has sometimes confused his numbers, as in this conversation about the disastrous merger between Time Warner / CNN and AOL:
Safer: "You lost nearly $ 10 million a day for two and a half years."
Turner: "No. One million a day, wait a minute – it would be $ 700 million, you're right, $ 10 million a day, listen, I can have thousands, millions, billions mixed up!"
Confusion, scandalous episodes of behavior, high euphoric and low moods were initially diagnosed as symptoms of manic depression.
Turner says it was a misdiagnosis. But he openly admits to having a progressive brain disorder called Lewy body dementia.
"It's a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer's disease. It's similar to that, but not as serious," Turner said. "Alzheimer's disease is fatal, thank God I do not have that, but I also … let's go … I do not remember his name anymore."
"Everything is fine," said Koppel. "Tell me what the …"
"It's dementia, I can not remember my illness!" he's laughing.
"It's an unpleasant thing to remember."
"You bet."
"Yeah, so just tell me what the symptoms are, I mean, one of the symptoms we're seeing right now is that you do not remember what you wanted to tell me, but frankly, Ted, at our age, you know , not being able to remember things is pretty common. "
"I, I know, I know, I know it."
"But it's more extreme with you?"
"Tired, exhausted.These are the main symptoms.And forgetfulness."
Ted Turner starts most mornings nowadays with yoga.
Ted Turner at a yoga session.
CBS News
He has never been a quitter. His eagerness to be broadcast on the network in a state of decadence is a testament to his courage – and his astonishing absence of vanity.
Turner has been and remains a passionate environmentalist. Although he noted to Koppel: "I am buying more land .I have enough."
Over the years, Turner has acquired approximately 2,000,000 acres in the United States, much of which is devoted to the restoration of the American bison.
There was once tens of millions of bison in the western United States. In the early 1900s, they had been slaughtered almost to the point of disappearing – there are only a few hundred left.
Turner says there are about 300,000 bison in the United States today and another 200,000 in Canada. "So there is about half a million."
"So, did you save the buffalo race?"
"Well, I do not know, we did it together," he said.
Bison on Ted Turner's Montana Ranch.
