Ted Turner, WCW Founder Who Battled Vince McMahon, Dies At 87
Ted Turner, the broadcasting billionaire who acquired Jim Crockett Promotions in 1988 and rebranded it as World Championship Wrestling, has died at the age of 87. Turner Enterprises confirmed his passing in a statement on Wednesday.
Turner had been hospitalized in early 2025 with a mild case of pneumonia and recovered at a rehabilitation facility. In 2018, he revealed he was living with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.
His broader legacy includes founding CNN, owning the Atlanta Braves, and creating the United Nations Foundation. But his fingerprints remain all over modern professional wrestling. WCW under Turner's ownership became the only company in the modern era to consistently beat Vince McMahon's WWF in the ratings, topping Raw for 83 straight weeks at the peak of the Monday Night Wars.
The single most consequential moment in WCW history did not happen in a ring. It happened in a 1995 corporate meeting, when Turner pulled Eric Bischoff aside and asked a simple question.
"Ted Turner asked me, 'Eric, what have we got to do to compete with WWE?'" Bischoff has recalled in subsequent interviews. "I wasn't prepared for that. 'Give me prime time.' I thought it was safe that he wouldn't do it. And Ted looks at me, looks at Scott Sasser, and goes, 'Scott, give Eric two hours, Monday night, on TNT.'"
That decision birthed WCW Monday Nitro, which debuted on September 4, 1995 opposite WWF Monday Night Raw. The ratings war that followed delivered the New World Order, Hulk Hogan's heel turn, the cruiserweight revolution, and the closest the wrestling industry has ever come to two national companies operating at competitive parity.
WWF's response came in 1996 with a series of parody sketches called "Billionaire Ted's Wrasslin' Warroom." The skits portrayed Turner as a bumbling Southern hillbilly, alongside parodies of Hogan ("The Huckster"), Randy Savage ("The Nacho Man"), and Gene Okerlund ("Scheme Gene").
According to Bischoff, Turner found the bits funny and laughed at the parodies of himself. McMahon's animosity at the time was real. Turner's amusement at being mocked, by all accounts, was genuine.
Turner's grip on WCW began to slip after Time Warner's 1996 acquisition of Turner Broadcasting. The 2001 AOL Time Warner merger pushed him further from daily operations, and new Turner Broadcasting head Jamie Kellner cancelled all WCW programming that March.
The cancellation collapsed Bischoff's Fusient Media bid to buy WCW and cleared the path for McMahon to acquire the company's assets at a fraction of their previous value. The deal ended the Monday Night Wars and Turner's wrestling era in a single transaction.
Turner is survived by his five children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
