Up until five years ago, I had had one of the most incredible runs in human history. I mean, in sports with a baseball team winning the World Series, winning the America's Cup. I got a photograph of myself with the World Series trophy under one arm and the America's Cup under the other. I mean, nobody ever did that before. And I started the first global network with CNN. We got it in everywhere. Russia, China, Japan, you name it. And I went around the world marketing it myself. And I did a lot of neat little things along the way. But losing my job, losing my fortune, and having other personal problems of quite significant magnitude humbled me, brought me down off my high horse. And I think it's made it...
No question. No question. Oh, I used to really think a lot of myself.
Ted Turner died May 6, 2026. He imagined himself a great man. He was in multiple ways. He created a huge institution, CNN. He changed things. After CNN, global news was not the same. He won things. The America's Cup in sailing is the fiercest challenge, not only against other sailors, but fast boats and the weather. He fulfilled other men's dreams, owning a major league baseball team and marrying a beautiful, smart actress. He was a rich man, owning companies and land worth billions of dollars. He was a good man, giving huge amounts of money to philanthropy. He was an admired man and a tragic man, climbing the tallest mountains and falling. He was there for all to see. Brash, cocky, driven, opinionated, sometimes unpleasant, and full of himself. And yes, Ted Turner died knowing he had touched lives and made a difference. In the end, that is what makes a great life.
I saw the other day where you'd been involved on the mall at the protest movement for the Million Woman March.
I wanted to march with the women.
It was a lot of fun too. Population. I had always wanted a march and I never had marched in a big march before and I'm going to do more marching. I don't have as much money as I had but I can sure go out and march.
So let's talk about your passions now. Marching.
Marching is number one. Marching for women and with women.
And with women, your passion for... you've got the Nuclear Threat Initiative, right? You're supporting that.
Sam Nunn and I... What's that about? That's to try and... that's an organization, an NGO that was designed to kind of help and prod governments along and fill in where governments can't or won't do the job to try and make the world safer from weapons of mass destruction than they currently are. Most people in the world don't know that the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States are on hair trigger alert 11 years after the Cold War has ended. And it's crazy. There could be a mistake. Our technology fails almost every day an airliner goes down somewhere in the world. And to have the 30,000 nuclear warheads on hair trigger alert where within minutes the whole world will be incinerated doesn't make any sense particularly when our relationship with the Russians has completely changed from what it was during the Cold War. Why have the posture on the weapons not been changed too? And we're working on that and we're making significant progress towards dealerting these missiles in cooperation with members of the Russian and the US government. It hasn't really gotten out yet publicly to any large degree, but a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to greatly reduce the threat that we will incinerate ourselves.
You said to Fortune magazine in a piece in 2003, you think the possibility of humanity surviving the next 50 years is about 50-50.
Because of a combination of things. Mainly because the human race, a combination of our population growth, which has grown in my lifetime to triple what it was. When I was born in 1938, the world population was just over two billion. It's 6.2 billion now. And if I live to be 80, it'll approach 8 billion. So in the lifetime of one person, the population has quadrupled of humans. Whereas the population of elephants and most other large wild animals is down by 80 or 90%. Half the forests in the world are gone. Basically what we're doing, there's too many of us with our technology putting too much pressure on the environment. We have to completely... we have to move to a new era where we're the best we can be. We're capable of doing this. We've had a successful civil rights movement. The major nations on earth, the first world, it's unthinkable that any first world country would go to war with another first world country. You'll never see another war between Germany and France. We've almost put war behind us. We need to put war behind us immediately. This war in Iraq has to be the last war. And I'll tell you why. The reason is that $800 billion a year that goes into the global military budgets needs to be used to create a new energy society that's based on renewables instead of fossil fuels. It was 95 degrees here today in Aspen, right? We're at 8,000 ft in the Colorado Rockies. How could it be 95 degrees here? It's global warming. It's climate change. That's what we want to call it now. It's political right. But unless we start dealing with the real basic underlying problems that threaten our very existence, we don't have much of a future. On the other hand, if we do the right things, if we do everything right for the next 50 years, we could be living in a paradise or we could be gone. It's our choice whether we want to go on and survive and prosper and live in a paradise, which this earth originally was. Even in the Bible, it says that. Or do we want to turn it into a hell, a hot burning hell where the plants have all withered and died and the water's all dried up and we're starving to death in the desert.
Where does this put your politics?
Where does it put my politics? I'm an independent. I'm for whoever comes up with the program that plans for our survival rather than our demise.
Who do you think speaks to those concerns of yours, John Kerry or George Bush? What do you think?
I have to say I want to be very on a very high plane. I mean, I just almost gave Ralph Reed a hug, you know, and nobody represents the religious right better than Ralph does. And I've known him for years. He lives in Atlanta now. Came down to haunt me on a daily basis.
Did you make him into an Atlanta...?
He turned the whole state over. The Republicans. Hell, we had Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran. You know, he defeated him. You know, he and the Republicans...
But you brought your arm around and hugged him here at this.
I didn't, but I almost did. After hearing him talk again tonight, I agree with 80% of what he says, but the other 20% I don't.
And so what do you think about what happened with respect to America so that we ended up in Iraq?
Well, I mean, I think history will look back as this debacle in Iraq is one of the greatest mistakes that any major country ever made in the history. It's as big a bad deal as Time Warner merging with AOL. That bad in one move. In one move, we set the United States back at least 30 years as far as our international relations. I mean, it is going to take a long time and a lot of work to repair our standing in the world.
But what if it turns out better?
Nothing that can happen in Iraq can... I mean, certainly it will be better if things work out great in Iraq, but we've had many chances to turn Haiti into a democracy and we haven't even been able to do that. It's only a couple hundred miles away and it's a country so broke we could buy it with pocket change, you know, and give everybody... it wouldn't even take sales tax to make everybody down there millionaires. So, and we can't straighten it out. How we were going to go over there by bombing Iraq. We're going to make it better. We wasted $200 billion of our money, hundred billion to destroy the infrastructure of the country. Then we had to pledge 100 billion to build it back to find one guy who was hiding in a foxhole.
You think if John Kerry's elected everything will change?
I don't know. I don't think everything will change. The only way that everything will change, that's the reason why I'm here. The only reason that it'll change is because the people of the earth want it to change, that they're willing to make some changes. These changes will not be painful to cut the military budgets all over the world in half and take that $400 billion and use it to improve education and health care and the economies of these third world countries where the reason we have terrorism in the world. The only way we will ever win the war on terrorism is not by shooting terrorists. We won't do it. First of all, we can't shoot them anyway. They blow themselves up before we can get our hands on them. How in the hell can you punish somebody that's already dead? Well, but they're also blowing up a lot of good people, too. And then there's what happened in the prison over there. A lot of American soldiers have been terrorizing and sodomizing prisoners of war for Christ's sake when we're over there high and mighty trying to tell everybody that we got all the answers and we're going after a repressive regime with torture when we were torturing people too. What about those big dogs that they said they could put on people? Have you ever had a German Shepherd dog turned on you that was mean? No. That's pretty scary. It is. Now, how do you think it came to that is my point? How did we get to this point where things are in your judgment so bad?
Well, really because we're so smart.
But we were smart enough to build refrigerators and internal combustion engines and all that sort of thing. And we didn't realize... and at the beginning there were just a few of them. So it didn't have much impact and there were only a relatively few of us. You know, a hundred years ago there were only one billion people on Earth. So... and we didn't have... well, when World War II we had 10 times as many cars in the United States as we had when World War II ended. 10 times as many. That's the reason... it's the magnitude of all of us with all our stuff and all of our basic needs that is creating a situation where the world can no longer support us and we are not living off the interest, the planet's production every year. We're living on the capital. The forests are receding. The oceans are already completely... almost completely... people aren't stupid. It's not the American people. It's everybody. But the American people consume more than anybody else. Homes. Homes in the United States are twice the square footage of homes in Europe owned by people that have comparable incomes as we do. In Japan, the houses are one-third the size of ours. We're the most wasteful people on earth.
Do you think that somebody who believes what Ted Turner believes could be elected president of the United States?
You think that's where the public, if in fact the issues are articulated and the facts are shown?
Absolutely. Anything is possible. Anything is possible. And the main thing is that with every passing day, we see what a mistake this war was. And quite frankly, today wars might have made sense back in the time of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar when they didn't have any pro-football or television to watch on Sunday afternoons. You had to have something to be excited about. And war was exciting, you know. All you got to go see is Troy, you know, Brad Pitt. He looks pretty good, you know, stamping that guy in the back. But nowadays with nuclear and weapons of mass destruction, war isn't fun anymore.
Tell me what the hardest thing about watching your net worth go from 10 or 11 billion to about one or two billion.
Oh, you mean my net worth?
Well, you know what? Once again, up until five years ago, I had had one of the most incredible runs in human history. I mean, sports with a baseball team won the World Series, winning the America's Cup. I got a photograph of myself with the World Series trophy under one arm and the America's Cup under the other. I mean, nobody ever did that before. And I started the first global network with CNN. We got it in everywhere. Russia, China, Japan, you name it. And I went around the world marketing it myself and I did a lot of neat little things along the way. But losing my job, losing my fortune, and having other personal problems of quite significant magnitude humbled me, brought me down off my high horse. Oh, and I think it's made...
No question. No question. Oh, I used to really think a lot of myself. Hey, I was married to a beautiful movie star. I mean, even if she was an activist.
But you know, so I was really... I was sitting on top of the world.
You were sitting on top of the world. Good. And you owned the largest amount of land in America.
I still do that now. And that's something, you know, it's not nothing. It's not nothing. Exactly. Bill Gates has given a whole lot of money. Billions of dollars. Way more than me. But he has more than me. Yeah. He's got more left than me too by a long shot.
But do you think it's a good idea for people as rich as you were and are to start giving it away way before they die and leaving some foundation? Particularly with the world situation what it is right now.
The world situation is so critical. You know, a lot of wealthy men live longer today because the health care is better and so forth. And as a result of that, for instance, for family planning, you know, we need the money to go into family planning now, not 15 or 20 years from now. The problems need to be solved right now. That's why I gave the money away right now. And over the last years, as soon as I started getting rich, I started thinking about giving money away. And it happened in tandem. And the richer I got, the more I gave away. And for a while there I thought I had a money machine, I'd give away a billion, I get another billion, you know, two. You know why that was? Because of the AOL Time Warner.
You didn't have 10 billion dollars before that merger.
I did too. I had close to... five, six, seven, eight depending on what... before the merger.
No. Yeah. When the... You know what you said at the time of the merger?
I know. I said I was trying to be a good team player and say something good about...
I said I felt so excited I felt as excited about signing the papers on the merger as I did about having sex the first time. But I didn't really... I was just trying to make the shareholders happy. We had all these guys from Time Inc. including myself and Time Warner that had all their money invested in the company and a lot of them are in this room and I wasn't the only one that lost his buns. It was the stupidest move you have ever seen.
You said it. Yes. The merger of AOL and Time Warner. The war in Iraq's close. How about selling Turner Broadcasting and your beloved CNN to Time Warner? How does that... brilliant idea? Was it really?
Because it made you the largest stockholder in Time Warner.
I had close to 10% of the stock and that was enough to where Jerry Levin, nobody in management dared come after me at that point. I felt like I was pretty safe. Safe enough. And Charlie, I'll tell you something else. One reason that I merged too is I had worked awful hard for awful long and I was tired. And when you're tired, it clouds your thinking a little bit. I probably... I mean obviously I probably shouldn't have done that merger.
Can you think of anybody that you know who's accomplished more? You who's accomplished more, winning the America's Cup, creating a world CNN?
I don't need to say that. You know, I don't need to... I think that, you know, I'm well known and well-liked all over the world. Well, I mean, there's some people that don't like me, I guess, but not many.
Let's ask in this room. How many people don't like you? Raise your hand.
How many people do like me? Hear that?
And this is a pretty sophisticated group, isn't it? That's right. Could you start all over today at 65 and create another empire if you wanted to?
Sure, you could. I... not at 65. Yeah. No, but I am working on with a partner, a good partner whose wife's here in the room, is Ted's Montana Grill. I mean, I really think that we're going to have a successful major restaurant chain and I think I got a chance of making another billion before I retire.
So, you're doing it to make money or not?
No, I'm doing it just to show... there's no business tougher than the restaurant business, right? Everybody knows that. Hardly anybody in this room's in the restaurant business. Nobody but an idiot would go into the restaurant business. Anybody. So why did Ted go into business? Profits are lower than any other business except well a filling station. But with $50,000 and a kitchen, you know, everybody knows how to cook, right? You know, anybody can open a restaurant, you know. I mean, so it's real easy to do and it's very very difficult and tough to make a buck.
Why not? It's all part of my environmental movement. I've got almost 2 million acres and I've got close to 40,000 bison and no cattle on my properties. The bison was the original American animal. The cows were imported from Europe. There were no cattle in North or South America. There were none in the Western Hemisphere when the white man arrived here, but there were millions of bison. And I think they're a better animal and the food's better for you. The meat has half as much fat and cholesterol and it tastes better.
And what do you think the odds are of making this a successful chain?
I think the odds are heavily in my favor.
Do you really? Yes. What is it you think you have? And I'm serious about this.
Little bit. Little bit. Well, you have to have a little bit of magic. I mean, hey, listen. Michael Eisner's here. He runs the magic kingdom. He does. He's gotten a lot of magic and he's still got a job. You know, he may have been downgraded a little bit, but not much. I mean, at least he... Mike, I came up and said, 'At least you still got a job.' You know, that's what you said to him.
So, when I ask you, we're friends. I said to you at the beginning of this conversation, you don't have a job. And so, you say to Michael, 'At least you have a job.'
Well, I got a job in the restaurant business. I can see. And I've got a job in philanthropy. I mean, I'm an officer at all three of my foundations.
A couple of questions about media before we go to philanthropy. All right. The media today, assess where you think it is. This competition too concentrated. You were against the FCC ruling.
Absolutely. And I've got a major article, op-ed type nine-page article coming out in Washington Monthly.
Yeah. It's going to be in it. What? Next month, right? Washington Monthly has been training ground for some great journals. I know. But it's got a circulation of two or three thousand.
Well, you're on my show. Well, at least it's going to be published. I mean, the New York Times turned it down, the Wall Street Journal. I think they... No, it's a scathing indictment of big business. And I'm part of big business. Sort of. Do you know that they made a big mistake firing me? I'm going to cause a lot of trouble.
Is revenge in your heart at all?
Yes, it is a little bit. I can't... I'm really mad as hell if you want.
Yeah, you are mad. Yes. You're mad at whom?
Mad at myself? Most of all yourself. Yeah, because... but mainly circumstances. I mean, if I had eight or 10 billion dollars today instead of one and a half, I could do a lot more good.
That burns at you, doesn't it? This idea that when it was up around 10 or 11 billion, you thought you could take those resources and give them away in a way that would make a difference in healthcare, in the fighting.
I got to make more speeches and appearances.
You're not going to do it by speeches and appearances.
Well, that's all I got. That's why I can go march, you know. I mean, I got a little publicity for that. But we've learned a lot during the last 10 years. And if we're not quite as effective without so much money, maybe we're giving 10 million where we gave away 70, but we can give that 10 million much more intelligently because of what we've learned. I think one of the proudest things I am of that I've been involved with... I mean obviously the Braves, CNN... I mean I'm proud of everything, even the cartoon... proudest you are... proudest of CNN but...
But I'll tell you where I think I may end up making a greater contribution even than there is in philanthropy because philanthropy needed some new ideas and some shaking up. There's nothing wrong with giving to your church or giving to your symphony or giving to the opera or giving to the museum or giving to your university. Those things are all worthwhile things to give to. But we shouldn't be giving 98% of our money to those things and only 2% to international aid and 2% to the environment. That's a wrong priority. We need to shift half our giving to more important things than symphonies and operas. And I love the opera. I mean, I wanted to be an opera singer and a fire chief and tried to be a manager of a baseball team. I did.
You interrupted. I didn't try.
I know you did. I did for a day. For a day and got in trouble because of it. Well, I shouldn't have. There was nothing illegal about it. They came up with new rules on the spot. I was like one of those guys in prison over in Iraq. You know, I was being tortured by somebody who had no reason to do it.
Bobby... I do like Bobby now that he's retired, but I don't like Levin.
I don't... Rupert Murdoch.
Why don't you like Rupert?
Because I think he's a bad journalist.
In other words, but no, this was before you thought he was... and that was before he screwed up the New York Post cover last week. What did you think of that?
Well, I think I bet you loved it more than anybody in the country. Sloppy journalism. That's all.
How do you think it happened?
We had sloppy journalism. We had sloppy journalism on that Sarah and Gas story. It was such a big secret that they kept it from top... bad. You know what you said at the time? I mean, that's really dumb. But you know what you said at the time? You said, 'I feel so bad about this. I almost want to commit suicide.'
Well, I wanted to apologize and make it clear how contrite I was.
When you make a mistake or your organization does, about all you can do if you... I mean I wasn't involved with it. All you can do is apologize and say we'll try not to make that mistake again. You know, if you're in business, particularly in journalism, and you're trying to... you're trying to beat deadlines, you're trying to beat the competition and get a scoop, you take risks sometimes on some stories not being accurate because you go to press with them too early before you've had a chance to check it out.
There is more to your enmity for Rupert Murdoch than just differences over journalism.
Well, I think he's a very frightening person.
Frightening because he has power.
Well, he runs Britain. He literally has control of Britain. I talked to Tony Blair many years ago and I said, 'Tony, why don't you crack down on Rupert a little? He's got too much control of Britain.' He said, 'Ted, I wouldn't have been elected. You know, I wouldn't be in my job without.' You said, 'I can't go after him.' What about that? So, he has too much power. Yeah. With half the newspaper readership and all the television channels and so forth. Does he have... what do you think of... and he would like to run the United States. He would like to run the world. He's close to running Australia. He does run Britain. He'd like to run the United States and he'd like to run India. Because I think through... and he's got a lot of television over there, but he really would like to dominate the world. And he only cares about two things, money and power. He does not care about doing good. He doesn't even have a small foundation. He gives no money away to charity that I know of. And if you call him up, he won't give you an interview.
And here you are with me.
Stay with me on this issue, though.
The issue of giving away money.
Okay. Well, that's different than the last one. All right. We'll come back.
Are you going to be able to keep your commitment to the UN?
To the UN? Yes. Yes. In fact, I am keeping my commitment.
