Ted Turner died May 6 at 87 in Atlanta, of complications from Lewy body dementia diagnosed in 2018. [1] The Memorial Day weekend retrospective is the second pass on the obituary — the first one led with CNN, which Turner founded in 1980 as a 24-hour cable news network the industry told him would not work. The retrospective is about everything he did with the money it earned.

He pledged a billion dollars to the United Nations in 1997, founded the UN Foundation as the vehicle, and kept writing checks against it for the rest of his life. [1] He bought roughly two million acres across Montana, New Mexico, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and South Carolina, and stocked them with bison — at peak he held around 51,000 head, the largest private bison herd in the world, and ran the Ted's Montana Grill restaurant chain partly as a market for the meat. He became, by acreage, the second-largest private landowner in the United States. [1][2] He founded the Goodwill Games in 1986 as a private-sector answer to the Cold War boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics, and ran the event four times. He greenlit Captain Planet and the Planeteers for TBS in 1990 — an animated children's series whose elemental-power conceit, mocked at the time, has aged into a recognizable piece of late-twentieth-century environmental literacy. [2]

The Atlanta empire reshaped television first and conservation second. The Memorial Day weekend reading is that the conservation footprint is the longer one. The bison herd is still on the land. The UN Foundation is still cutting checks. The cable-news model is the one most contested in 2026. Of the four legacies, the one that does not need re-litigation this weekend is the one with hooves.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York