NEW ORLEANS
-- AOL Time Warner (AOLTW) vice chairman Ted Turner is none too happy about the deal that created the merged traditional
and online media company, but he probably won't abandon ship completely just yet.
Turner, speaking here Wednesday morning before flying to
New York
for a meeting of AOLTW's board, said he would decide after that meeting whether to stay on the board after leaving his management post as vice chairman
in May.
"I'm gonna make the decision up after I talk to the board, but I'm leaning toward staying a little longer. I kind of hate to leave right
as the war is getting started. Who knows? The war might spread. They might need me there -- I don't know what for, but I'm good when things
are bad," Turner told Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) president Tom Wheeler in a keynote session
that took the form of a fireside chat. Turner's famous wit and outspoken views drew frequent laughs and applause.
"I'd rather go back and be with one of my ex-wives than go through this again," Turner said, referring to the aftermath of
the America Online-Time Warner merger, completed in January 2001. Turner is AOLTW's largest individual shareholder and has lost billions as the company's stock has fallen since the merger.
The merger was a textbook case of what to do wrong, including making the deal at the height of the stock market and making
Time Warner's already complex multimedia business even more complicated, he said. Turner stopped short of saying the company
should spin off AOL, as he had suggested in a New York Times interview published Wednesday.
Turner, who in 1997 pledged to donate $1 billion to the United Nations Foundation over 10 years, several times in the session
lamented the expected war in Iraq. Asked about his modern-day heroes, he named Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.
"It's just too bad that Martin Luther King was not alive in the last six months, because he might have been able to organize
the kind of protests that would have stopped us from going into this war," Turner said.
CTIA Wireless ends Wednesday.
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