Ted Turner, America's largest private landowner and media mogul, is also one of the country's most generous philanthropists. Turner's $1 billion pledge to the United Nations (1998) is his best known philanthropic act, but he has other philanthropic interests: the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship is awarded to fiction writers that provide positive resolutions to global problems; the Turner Foundation makes grants in the areas of environment and population. The Turner Endangered Species Fund is dedicated to conserving biodiversity by ensuring the persistence of imperiled species. He also created the Goodwill Games in 1986 in reaction to political problems surrouding the 1980 Olympics. His Community Youth Development Initative provides support for programs in 30 rural communities near his properties. In 2001 he and Senator Sam Nunn established the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) which works to reduce the global threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

When he was nine years old, Turner's family moved from Cincinnati to Savannah, Georgia. He attended the McCallie School in Chatanooga, Tennesee as a child. He went on to Brown University in 1956, graduating in 1960. Turner took over the family billboard business in 1962 after his father's suicide. In 1970 Turner purchased a small, struggling UHF station, WJRJ-Atlanta, and renamed it WTCG, for parent company Turner Communications Group. WTCG invented the "superstation" concept, transmitting via satellite to cable systems in many parts of the world.

After Turner purchased the Atlanta Braves baseball team (1976), he appointed baseball great Hank Aaron vice president of player development, making him one of the first African Americans in major league baseball upper-level management.. In 1977 Turner purchased the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. In 1980 he launched CNN, the worlds first round the clock television news station, which is broadcast to more than 210 countries and territories worldwide. He launched CNN Headline News and CNN radio in 1982 and CNN International began Global News Service three years later (1985). Turner Network Television appeared in (1988). In the 1990s, Turner's TBS merged with AOL Time Warner. He resigned from the board of that company in 2006.

Time magazine named Turner the 1991 Man of the Year. He was named Cable and Broadcasting's Man of the Century in 1999. Turner was inducted into the Cable TV Hall of Fame in 1999, and in June 2000 he received the World Ecology Award from the University of Missouri.