Ted Turner cc 2009

Sure. My father was in the outdoor advertising business, and I grew up at home with him. When I was 12 years old, he decided that I should go to work full-time in the summer. I was going off to military preparatory school at the time, and I started working as a laborer putting up the billboards. Over the next 10 years or so, every summer I worked in a different area. I learned to be a bill poster, I learned to be a sign painter, I learned how to do the electrical lighting on the signs, I learned how to be a leaseman and lease locations, and I learned how to be a salesman and sell advertising space. When I grew up, he passed away when I was 23, and he had left the small company heavily in debt because he'd been expanding rapidly with borrowed money.

I operated the billboard business. I already knew how to do it because he taught me everything I needed to know. In college, I had majored in classics and history, and I learned about leadership, government, warfare, and strategy from that. Then I had the business background from him, and I was very successful in the billboard business. To me, it was pretty easy. You didn't have to worry about programming, and all you had to do was lease the sign for more money than it cost you for the location and to amortize the cost of putting the sign up there. It had a real nice cash flow.

I looked around when I was in my late 20s for another challenge for my life because I didn't want to just make money; I wanted to do something that made a difference in the world as well. I didn't think that the two were exclusive. I had been a Rotarian by that time—my father had been one before me—and Rotary's motto is that "He profits most who serves best." I believed that and I wanted that to be my own personal slogan. I looked around and I couldn't afford to buy a television station, so I got some radio stations through merger and acquisition. I had five radio stations, and radio was okay, but I liked television better.

When I saw there was a UHF television—I didn't even know what UHF was—but I found out quickly with a little research that UHF was hard to get. You couldn't get it with your VHF antennas; you had to have a special antenna that cost money. I used to say that our viewers were smarter than the network television viewers. The advertisers said, "Why?" because our audience was very low compared to theirs. I said, "Because you've got to be a near genius to figure out how to get a UHF signal." I said the other people that don't have it can't figure out how to get it. It's like television sets are today: I've got a TV set that you've got to go through five procedures to turn the damn thing on. It's just ridiculous. In cars now, you push a button to shift gears. I just really learned how to work the lever, and a radio has 25 buttons on it now. It's just so complicated. People say to me, "How do you feel about getting old? Are you worried about your mortality?" I said, "Hell no, I won't have to get up in the morning." Is that enough? That's enough. And for the rest of it, you can read my book.

So I got to television and I loved that.

Because you did new programs. Later on, as quickly as I could, I got National Geographic's programming to run on TBS. I got Captain Cousteau programming away from public broadcasting, and I got the Audubon Society to do a series of documentaries on wildlife and the environment. I had a lot of environmental programming before Discovery Channel was even launched and obviously before National Geographic was. That made me feel good. I really felt good about CNN because I really tried to make it a responsible news organization and try not to overemphasize sensationalism and yellow journalism. It must have worked because 15 years after we went on the air, survey after survey worldwide showed that we were the most respected news organization in the world—newspaper, magazine—and we were only 15 years old. The New York Times was over 100.

I really was close to my classics professor at Brown University, Dr. Workman. That's about it. I mean, I liked my teachers, but my father was my main mentor.

First of all, until I merged with Time Warner, I did not have major investments in the cable industry other than my whole business—I was a programmer. The cable industry was defined at that time as the people that were cable operators, but then later cable programming was considered part of cable. We couldn't even join the association. The cable TV association wouldn't let me join at the beginning because I wasn't a cable operator; I was a programmer trying to emphasize programming for cable, but technically I was just a broadcaster. That was back in the early '70s. But then they created an associates category so you could be an associate member of the association, and of course I signed up for that. Later they made it so they'd let us become full members, and I was the first cable programmer to be chairman of NCTA. You had to go through procedures to do it. At the time that we went on satellite in 1976, cable was in 14% of US households. There was no satellite industry at that time. Today I think cable's in like 70% of all homes and satellite's in 30% or 35%, something like that, so it's almost universal.

I'm sorry?

TBS was already on the satellite and had been up there. I always was asking questions and thinking a lot. I went over a list of things: what would be... We've got new movies with HBO. HBO was up there first with their pay-TV movie system, and we had old comedies and a lot of sports. This was before ESPN was launched, and there were very few cable networks—I can't remember how few, but less than five or six.

Basically, the idea for an all-news channel just came from the fact that I would work till 6:00 or 6:30. I worked a lot of hours when I was younger, and when I got home at night at 7:00, the news was already over and they were going into network programming. By 10:00, I was tired and I had to go to sleep, and they didn't even have a 10:00 newscast. In those days, the newscast came on at 11:00 after the network programming ended. So I never got to see the news. I said, "Boy, it'd be nice to have the news on whenever." I didn't figure you had to be a genius to figure that out. It's like having a wife: you've got access to lovemaking all the time, instead of a girlfriend where you only see her on Friday nights. That's why people get married, isn't it? Have somebody to fry the bacon.

Anyway, 24/7 availability had a lot of appeal. I thought, well, what about doctors getting home from the emergency room at 2:00 in the morning? There's nothing on. Having news on all the time would be good. And there'd be another advantage to it because there was only two and a half hours of news on back in those days: a half-hour network news and two hours of the morning show from 7:00 to 9:00, The Today Show and Good Morning America. That was 21 and a half or 22 hours a day that there was no news on. So I figured that's a real good idea, that's a no-brainer if you could operate it at an expense level that would allow you to have a chance of breaking even in a reasonable amount of time and then make some money.

I figured you couldn't do it with pure advertising; you need to have a subscriber fee, too. We were the first network to charge a basic subscriber fee, although PBS charged 10 cents a month for the transmission to use the satellite. Anyway, I thought CBS, NBC, or ABC would do it. Years passed, just a couple or three, and cable had increased its penetration dramatically, and other networks were starting up. I really felt like things were going well, and I started thinking, well, maybe if these other networks won't do it—that are much better equipped to do it because they already had a news organization, they already had most of the stories, they already had bureaus, they already had all the infrastructure that I was going to need if I did it myself—that's when I started thinking, maybe I should try and do it myself. That's how the idea started.

Then when I finally made the decision to do it, I decided to do it as fast as possible so that we'd get on the air before anybody else could figure it out, because I figured once one was going to do it... A lot of times people have more courage to do things that somebody's already done first. And it worked out really well. We met even though we had difficulties that were unanticipated, like the satellite disappearing and costing us twice as much as we projected, and our revenues were half what we projected for the first year. So the banks called our loans, and I was almost bankrupt, and we sweated payrolls, and I tore the postage stamps off the incoming mail that hadn't been canceled.

It turns out we had all this mail because we didn't have paid national advertising, but we could sell stuff like Krazy Glue and hits of the '40s and '50s. You still see these things: direct-response advertising where you call in right now and you'll be thin, guaranteed; you'll lose 100 pounds in 60 days. We got all these letters from all over the country with $25 to send us whatever it was. That was a way I could tell before Nielsen would give us ratings. I'd look at where the postmarks were from, where this mail was coming. With every passing month, we picked up more subscribers as there were more cable systems, and more mail came in, and we got a percentage of what we sold. As a result of that, that was the revenue that we lived on. While I was doing that, I noticed that on about one out of 20 envelopes, the post office department was real sloppy: they didn't stamp "used" on the stamp; they didn't stamp anything on it. So I tore those stamps off—the corner off—and we steamed them with a steamer, and then we glued them on our outgoing mail. That's how we paid for the mail. That's how we made it. That's the honest truth, so help me. And it's in the book.

I believe you. It was legal.

You'd reuse stamps over again?

You didn't do it on the scale we did, though. We did it on a megascale with a thousand stamps a day.

Oh, sure. I'd have demanded that we check AOL's books a little better. Maybe we would have caught the accounting irregularities that they had slipped in there that overstated their earnings and got us to overpay by about $100 billion. That would have been the number one thing I would have done, and I'd be rich—I'd be one of the 10 richest men instead of down around 200. But the thing about it that people enjoy is that, for a very brief moment, I was worth about $10 billion. But even though I lost 80% or so of what I had, if you take it real easy on buying new airplanes and that kind of thing, you can get by on a billion if you don't take extravagant vacations and things like that, if you just live simply.

Nothing. Maybe there ended up being more channels than I thought there'd be, but I didn't really have a firm number in mind. There's so much of everything now that it's kind of confusing.

Cartoon Network at any given time has double the audience of CNN. People don't think about that. Cartoon Network was a home run of incredible proportions. That's right. And so was TNT. TNT, Turner Classic Movies—that's one of the most popular channels out there.

Yeah, because entertainment program brands make hour, two-hour shows; most of the shows are produced somewhere else and all you have to do is run them. But with CNN, you had to program the whole thing 24/7. That's huge. ESPN runs ball games that last two and a half hours, and they only need one ball game to run two and a half hours. What's going on on the field is not their business much; they just televise the game. But with the news, you've got to do the whole thing all day, every day, and that's a real challenge to keep it interesting. How much do you repeat? The decisions are huge, and it's more complicated than running canned programming that you just put on a machine and run like a movie in a movie theater.

Well, you try and get the right people. When I started with the television station in Atlanta, when I bought it in January of 1970, there were 35 people in the television company. In '96, when I merged with Time Warner, there were 12,000 people. That's growth. We went from $600,000 in revenue the first whole year to $2.5 billion. And we went from losing a million dollars the first year on 600,000 to making $500 or $600 million, and our stock went up 3,000 times. That's how I went from being flat broke to worth $10 billion. It didn't last long, and I was giving it away so fast anyway. I gave away a billion and a half, a little more, and if I had made more, I would have given it away, too, because what good are billions? You want the money to keep moving and keep doing good.

If I had the money back, I would have never let Time Warner get away. But you can't worry about that; you've got to live in the present. I rode it up and I rode it down. I'm in better shape financially than most people even today, and I don't owe any money, and I eat at Ted's so I can afford to eat.

It's a good value, son. It is. You ever been there? It's $20 worth of food for $10.

It didn't. I just said, "Go do it. Let's do it." If you've got a winning operation—and I've proven it with my baseball team: when I got Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz in there, they were there for 25 years, and they were the right guys, and we won 14 divisions consecutively. No team in professional sports has ever won 14 consecutive championships for their division. We only won one World Series, but we won one and we were in four. So you've got to say the Braves were the winningest team in baseball for that period of time.

And when I raced sailboats, I won the America's Cup, and I won 600 trophies and three or four world championships and half a dozen US championships. And in business. So, I'm 71 years old, and I can look anybody in the eye and say I'm a winner. When I was a little boy growing up, my parents said, "Son, work hard and be a big success." I went to school, and school said, "Work hard and be a big success." People said, "What's the secret?" I said, "All I did was follow orders. They told me to work hard and be a big success." So that's what I did, and that's what I asked my fellow employees to do: work hard and be a big success. There's no magic formula. If you read my book, you'll see that. I guarantee you'll be richer if you read it; the people that read my book after 20 years will be better off than those that didn't. I can promise you that. And in 20 years, if that hasn't happened, you send that book back to me and I'll give you double your money back. How about that? You won't see an offer like that on TV.

My estate will be legally bound if for some reason I'm not here, but I intend to make it to 90 if we can get rid of nuclear weapons and global warming. If we don't do that, none of us will make it in 20 years, or there won't be many of us.