You used to be able to count on Ted Turner to provide a whoosh of air into the stale hot climate that the increasingly buttoned down cable industry produces. But, then the man who founded Turner Broadcasting, CNN and even TNT as well as married Jane Fonda, quietly retired to raise bison or some such thing in the West and the industry got back to pushing around stagnant air.
Turner, though, didn't acquire his descriptor as the Mouth of the South by being a bison rancher. True to form, the former Time Warner board executive and member jumped back on the stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills where he shared the stage with T. Boone Pickens and Michael Milken and announced that his TW colleagues missed the boat with Google.
"I'm not on the (Time Warner) board anymore because they didn't get it," Turner told the audience. We have to stop doing the dumb things and start doing the smart things. We had 5 percent of Google in a music merger and I said to Dick Parsons, 'Dick, I think we ought to hang on to that Google stock.' That was 10 years ago. He said that company is a bunch of bull (excrement)."
For more:
- see this story in the Hollywood Reporter
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