Ted Turner, CNN founder, media maverick, and philanthropist who gave away billions, dies at 87

Ted Turner, CNN founder and philanthropist, who built a towering charitable legacy after selling his Atlanta-based media empire, has died at the age of 87. In 1997, Turner pledged a landmark $1 billion to the United Nations (worth more than $2 billion today), funding poverty relief, peacebuilding, refugee support, disease prevention, and land mine removal worldwide. Through the Turner Foundation, he was also a pioneer in large-scale environmental conservation funding and was a singular figure in the successful efforts to restore U.S. bison populations. At the end of the Cold War, Turner co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative to curb the development of nuclear and biological weapons. At the time of his death, Turner–who chided his fellow billionaires to treat their philanthropy as an obligation and not as branding–had reportedly given away much of his fortune.