Ted Turner Focuses Wealth On Ranch Land Media Mogul Finds Solace In Vast Acreages And Buffalo
Forget his company’s $7.5 billion merger with Time Warner Inc. Forget his war of words with Rupert Murdoch over cable news in New York City. Forget even his Atlanta Braves’ flameout in the World Series.
Ted Turner, the blunt-talking entrepreneur whose marriage to Jane Fonda and penchant for controversy have made him one of the nation’s most talked-about business people, is carving out a new empire that obsesses him almost as much as his cable-TV business did while he built it up over 30 years.
Turner, who turned 58 last month, is pouring a big chunk of his $2.7 billion fortune into that most ancient of all investments, land, and he is populating it with that mythic American beast, the buffalo.
Only this time, for a change, he is pursuing his dream out of the limelight.
Starting from scratch nine years ago, Turner has amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of ranch land, roughly enough to fill the state of Delaware, on eight ranches in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska.
Already one of America’s top 20 landowners, Turner shows no sign of slowing his acquisition frenzy. He is now negotiating the purchase of his first ranch outside the United States, a 9,000-acre spread in Argentina.
A self-described environmentalist, Turner vows he will never develop his ranch land. Instead, he is giving it the nation’s biggest herd of buffalo, as American bison are commonly known - about 12,000 so far. While he won’t be making anywhere near the money he would if he laid down roads and sold off plots, the land gives him the physical freedom he seems to crave and the excitement of creating a new business he seems to need.
On a recent Sunday, maneuvering his Land Rover over the muddy roads of the Flying D, his 107,000-acre ranch near Bozeman, chomping tobacco and greeting the occasional hunter he allows to pay $9,500 for five days of shooting on the property, Turner, dressed in boots, jeans and a knit sweater, fairly shouted over the din of the motor: “I joke that this is my backup life. In case I don’t like being vice chairman of Time Warner, I can always come here.”
As Time Warner’s largest shareholder, with 11 percent of its stock, Turner says he has adapted to his new corporate role. “So far, I like it fine,” he said. “Most entrepreneurs don’t last very long in big companies. But I’m not normal. Like my psychiatrist said: ‘We are all different. We are all like snowflakes.”
He finds it less easy to explain his infatuation with land. True, there are tax benefits. In 1989, after paying $20 million, or $187 an acre, for Flying D, Turner agreed not to break up the land into more than four pieces or to sell it.
The environmentally friendly move reduced the commercial value by nearly half, a loss he was able to deduct from his taxable income for a savings of several million dollars. (He has similarly moved to preserve three large landholdings in the South.) And tax law permits ranchers to deduct losses from operations.
Even so, tax savings are not driving Turner’s investment strategy. And though he is quick to note that the price of land adjacent to his has shot up to $350 an acre, almost double what he paid, he cannot really benefit from the property boom because, he says: “I’m not planning to develop the land or sell it. I plan to leave it in a trust for my children.”
That is not to say Turner takes no notice of the size of his fortune. The investment in land, at $150 million roughly 5 percent of his assets, is not so large or so reckless as to jeopardize his place in the Forbes 400, a list he has called a deterrent to charitable giving because those on it want to keep the wealth that put them there.
His ranching, though, probably won’t push him up much higher. Even the one activity that promises a big payoff - his buffalo herd, which began with a $3 million investment in 1990 and is worth $30 million today - is small change for one of the richest men in America.
Like most entrepreneurs, Turner wants to be in control. But while other billionaires collect artworks or palatial homes or jet planes, he says: “I’m a collector of land. I have eight ranches and three plantations. If you have an olive, you want an olive tree. You want a little more. You want the whole tree. Then you want a little this and then a little that.”
Total control means Turner never has to make compromises. “You know, sometimes you have to compromise in television,” he said. “I’ve had to do stuff and put on programs or films that I didn’t agree with and was not sympathetic to,” and then he added, unable to resist a jab at his archrival, “though they were never as violent as some of Rupert Murdoch’s shows.
“But out here, I don’t have to.”
The Flying D is Turner’s flagship ranch and perhaps his favorite. He brought Jane Fonda here the first weekend they went away together.
Since they married five years ago, the couple have built a log-cabin hideaway on a man-made lake with panoramic mountain views, and they have furnished it with oversized white-wool sofas, carved wooden chairs with bear-claw handles and animal-skin rugs.
Fonda’s two Oscars and other awards from her acting career are displayed in a cabinet. The bookcases contain titles like “The Last Rain Forest” and “California Style.” The coffee table holds arrowheads and other Native American relics from Turner’s ranches, as well as two thick leather-bound books embossed with the words “Home Sweet Homes” that contain Fonda’s photographs of their properties.
Ted Turner’s life style today is a far cry from his sailing days, when he was known as hard-drinking and raucous. On a recent morning here, Turner was up at 5:30 a.m. to shoot ducks with the ranch staff.
Out of hunting season, Turner can make the 1/2-hour drive across the Flying D without spotting a single human being.
And yet the property is just a patch compared with his latest acquisition of a ranch in New Mexico called Vermejo Park. Stretching across 578,000 acres, it contains 22 lakes, 30 miles of fishing streams and some ramshackle buildings, including an old stagecoach station from the coalmining days at the turn of the century. Estimates of the purchase price range from $70 million to $90 million.
Turner’s passion for pastoral pursuits began as diversion from his urban obsession: Turner Broadcasting, which he took over in 1963 after his father’s suicide.
The 34-year-old son threw all of his energy into transforming what was then a small, regional outdoor advertising company in Atlanta into a cable-programming giant, frequently pushing it to the financial edge.
He bought three former rice plantations in the Southeast in the 1970s. But he did not get into Western ranching until 1987. Was it only a coincidence that he’d just lost control of Turner Broadcasting System?
Under pressure to make payments on his $1.5 billion acquisition of the MGM Entertainment Co., Turner made the greatest compromise of his career that year, ceding a big interest of his company to a consortium of cable operators.
Or was it, rather than a chance event, a way to recapture the independence he was losing in his business venture? Turner himself votes for the latter interpretation. “Yeah, it clearly was an offset,” he said. Then he burst into song: “Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don’t fence me in.”
One associate sees a simpler motivation. “When you spend time with Ted at his ranches, you are going to be up from sunup to sundown and you will be hunting to fishing to hiking, the entire day,” says F. Taylor Glover, his financial consultant and friend of 20 years. “You come back in and have a 15-minute gourmet dinner and go back out for a wildlife ride that won’t end until sunset. He loves owning land, and has rarely sold any.
The Western purchases began as a hobby. “As a kid I did a lot of hunting and fishing and tromped around the land,” he recalled as he pulled off his boots after a long ride. “I used to go quail shooting with my Dad.”
But by his teens, he had taken to sailing, going on to win the America’s Cup in 1977.
Then, he said: “I gave up sailing when I got to the top of my game in 1981.
“I crewed, but it wasn’t the same.” And so he bought land, looking for “a place to stomp around and do some hunting.”
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Geraldine Fabrikant N.Y. Times News Service