Ted Turner is now Nebraska's largest private landowner. He also recently became the largest landowner in Cherry County after purchasing more than 8,000 acres at a public auction May 1.
With the purchase of 18 parcels of land – 8,834.82 acres in all – from the Board of Educational Lands and Funds, Turner owns more land than anyone else in Cherry County.
According to the North Platte Bulletin, Turner purchased the land for $2.79 million at the BELF auction at the Cherry County courthouse May 1. The overall average cost per acre was $317, with a range from $240 to $480 per acre.
With these purchases, Turner now owns about 196,994 acres in Cherry County.
Turner representatives were also interested in purchasing an additional 1,904.53 acres in Sheridan County May 2.
Turner’s five ranches would then comprise at lease 357,719 acres in the Nebraska Sandhills, where his first purchase was the Spike Box ranch – 32,000 acres sold to Turner for $4.75 million in 1995. To put it another way, Turner owns one in every 112 acres in Nebraska.
Turner is the largest individual landowner in the country with 1.8 million acres. Besides Nebraska, Turner owns acreage in Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
The Turner empire is bigger than Delaware. It is enough mountain and valley and river and prairie that it could rank as the 48th-largest state.
Turner also owns 128,000 acres of ranchland in Patagonia.
Brochures for Turner Enterprises proclaim that his dream is to manage vast lands in economically sustainable and an ecologically sensitive manner while conserving native species.
His net worth, estimated at $4.8 billion last year, puts Turner 25th on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.
Turner’s main business is still bison. He owns more than 8 percent of the country’s population of bison, 27,000 head. Once married to Jane Fonda, Turner is a frequent visitor to North Platte and his home in the Nebraska Sandhills.
Turner, 67, is best known for founding CNN, the Cable News Network and TBS, a cable superstation from Atlanta. His nickname is “The Mouth of the South” for the controversial statements he has made through the years. This week, Turner kicked off the auction for his life story with publishing sources saying they expected Turner to snag an advance of $7 million - or higher. On Friday, Turner's literary agent reached a $4.5 million deal to publish his life story, the New York Post reported. Citing "publishing sources," the paper reported that Hachette Books had purchased the rights to the CNN founder's life story.
Turner started CNN in 1980 and in 1996 sold the cable news channel and the rest of his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner. He left the Time Warner board of directors this spring.
