From a 1978 Playboy Interview with Ted Turner, who was always batshit crazy, probably a necessary personality type if you aspire to turn a billboard advertising business into a billion-dollar cable TV company:
“PLAYBOY: It wasn’t long before you took over the company, right?
TURNER: That’s right. My father committed suicide when I was 24 years old. Blew his brains out. I think he made the mistake of limiting his horizons. When he was a boy in Mississippi, he had told his mother that someday he would make $1,000,000. And when he did that, he had nowhere to go from there. When he killed himself, he was extended for about $5,000,000 or $6,000,000 and had assets of only about $2,000,000. But the situation was not hopeless.
PLAYBOY: How did you handle it?
TURNER: Well, just before he shot himself, he had actually sold the company. But I wanted to keep it. So I had to return the down payment, plus a penalty to the guys who had bought it, to annul the deal. Everybody said I was crazy. I could have taken that money and started something else. Those were very bad times in outdoor advertising. Television was killing billboards.
PLAYBOY: How did you survive?
TURNER: By hustling. We doubled our profits at a time when the industry went down 16 percent. But it’s fun, too, getting up at five in the morning to get out and install a new sign before the traffic gets started. And painting billboards, you’re Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, except that you don’t have to work lying on your back. One night, the guys were doing this 50-foot billboard with the Coppertone girl stretched out across it, you know. So they just left off the bikini. Painted on tits and a nice bush at the right spot, see. But we made them dress her before it went out of the warehouse. After about four years in the business, I could have retired.
PLAYBOY: Why didn’t you?
TURNER: I heard about a television station for sale. It was Channel 17, a U.H.F. independent in Atlanta. When I bought that, everybody just hooted at me. The station was really at death’s door–we lost about $2,000,000 in the first two years. I didn’t bullshit anybody: I told them I didn’t know anything about TV. But now we’re socko. We’ve got all the reruns, all the sports in Atlanta and people love us. Our movie inventory includes about half of the 6000 or 7000 movies ever made. We even have news: It comes on at four in the morning. Our news director gets pies thrown in his face a lot.”
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Turner interviews Carl Sagan, 1989: