Turner
Ten years after he sold his company to Time Warner, Ted Turner is severing one of his last significant ties with the conglom.
Onetime magnate said Friday that he won't run for re-election on the TW board when his term expires this spring.
Instead, Turner will concentrate on ranching, real estate and philanthropic activities, as well as social causes such as alternative energy.
He is also known for Ted's Montana Grill, an expanding chain of restaurants that features bison meat as a central menu item.
Turner released a brief statement wishing Time Warner well -- a move perhaps facilitated by the fact that some of the execs with whom Turner reportedly clashed, like Gerald Levin, are no longer with the company.
Turner will continue to own about a 0.7% stake in Time Warner, or 32 million shares, worth north of half a billion dollars.
Move, while not unexpected, nonetheless reps the end of an era.
Turner was a visionary founder of CNN who 25 years ago saw the potential for -- and created -- 24-hour news. As founder of WTBS, he was also among the first to anticipate the national appeal of local and specialty cable programming: Turner took what was essentially a local Atlanta channel founded in the early 1970s and distributed it around the country, setting the table for the 200-channel universe.
Exec also bought MGM in a failed acquisition that nonetheless provided the library backbone that enabled the success of the TNT and TCM cable nets.
When the mogul sold Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner in 1996, it was part of a wave of mergers that aligned diverse assets such as cable, film and publishing.
But over the last few years, Turner has been sidelined from the conglom's operations. In 2000 he was passed over for a top post after the AOL merger; in 2003 he stepped down as vice chairman, signaling what would become a permanently diminished role for the exec.
He has also sounded a lot more like a critic of the mainstream media than an architect of it; three years ago he called Rupert Murdoch a "warmonger" after some of the Oz mogul's publications supported the Iraq war. He has been openly critical of media consolidation.
Like Carl Icahn, Turner has been one of the most prominent critics of Time Warner's merger with AOL, though some critics have been quick to recall his initial support.
Also Friday, another TW board member, Carla Hills, announced she would not run for re-election because of a mandatory retirement age.
The new departures, along with the decision of an AOL exec to leave the board, bring the total number of vacant seats on the 14-member board to three. That could restore some of the drama to the company's May board meeting in Atlanta, some of which was deflated when Icahn recently called off his proxy fight with TW management.
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