- Mark Cuban: "I like to read biographies of successful people. Ted Turner's bio was always big for me because he worked hard and played hard." source ↗
Ted Turner's autobiography, written with Bill Burke, covering his rise from a Savannah billboard company to CNN — the first 24-hour news network — TBS, and the America's Cup, alongside his polarizing personality, his marriages, and his $1 billion gift to the UN. A founding story of an outsider who bet everything on an idea the establishment dismissed.
Cuban's Reddit AMA quote — 'I like to read biographies of successful people. Ted Turner's bio was always big for me because he worked hard and played hard' — is about which biographies founders should reach for: not the sanitized ones, but the ones from people who made their own rules. The lessons for a founder are Turner's audacity (launching CNN against the networks), his willingness to eat his mistakes, and the discipline that kept him at the table for decades.