In my conversations with you, you tell me how you own your home and have no debt. Turns out Ted Turner had a lot in common with you. Turner, a.k.a. “Captain Outrageous,” liked to buy land, an investment he called “The only thing that lasts.” E.B. Solomont reports in The Wall Street Journal:
Media titan Ted Turner once said he didn’t like to buy anything except land. “It’s the only thing that lasts,” he said in a 2004 interview.
The founder of CNN, who died Wednesday at age 87, owned roughly 2 million acres of land in at least six U.S. states, making him the fourth-largest landowner in the country, according to the Land Report magazine, which ranks land ownership. A conservationist, Turner owned and operated 13 ranches that were home to roughly 45,000 bison, Turner Enterprises said.
Turner’s conservation efforts and eco-tourism initiatives distinguished him from other major land owners, said Eric O’Keefe, editor of the Land Report. “There are lots of people who own lots of acreage,” he said, but what set Turner apart was “what he did in terms of making his land resilient and productive.”
Turner was also a pioneer, O’Keefe said, purchasing large amounts of land in Montana and New Mexico long before others did so, and before land values in those places skyrocketed. He put much of the land into conservation.
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