The Bold Ones Win

This week, word came out that the CEO of a name-brand, heavily memed company was trying to do something completely audacious.

Also, Ted Turner, the guy who arguably invented that trick and arguably did it better than possibly anyone else of his generation, just died.

It’s hard not to want to compare the left-field tactics of Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, founder of Chewy, and apparent suitor of eBay, to what Turner did throughout his long, storied, crazy-like-a-fox career. There’s a modest cult of personality around Cohen; I have a self-contained cult of personality around Turner, who is one of my favorite business leaders of the modern era.

I described Turner way back in 2015 as the Steve Jobs of television, and it’s a reputation that sticks. Like Jobs, he faced his share of boardroom drama, and took bold swings that everyone thought were out there at the time but looked brilliant in retrospect.

There are so many good stories about Turner, the guy who shot a nuclear winter contingency plan for his 24-hour news network. He was perhaps the only competitive yachtsman of note to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, a magazine whose then-owner later bought his company. He tried (and quickly failed) to take on MTV. He attempted to colorize lots of films for purely commercial reasons, only to do an about-face and launch a prestige cable channel instead. He created an environmentally friendly superhero.

And then there’s whatever the Goodwill Games was.

But in 1985, he had a moment where his boldness was about to knock him off the rails. In April of that year, he announced his plans to launch a hostile takeover of CBS, a company that, like eBay, was comically larger than its potential acquirer. Like Ryan Cohen’s eBay bid, Turner was trying to do it with cash he largely did not have. And it felt audacious at the time; the Macon Telegraph dedicated an entire page of its business section just to the implications of the deal, involving one of Georgia’s most powerful residents.

It didn‘t work out, ultimately; for once, Turner’s audacity got the best of him. His consolation prize? Buying the MGM library, considered a film industry crown jewel at the time, but selling the company. (The colorization drama came after.)

Now, 40 years later, we have a different class of weird, audacious, CEOs, the kind that are more likely to take potshots at the UN than give it a billion dollars just because.

And then we have dudes like GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, who does admittedly have a track record. Chewy is a pretty huge company that blew up after he refused to accept the logic that a pet-centric e-commerce site couldn’t work. In some ways, Turner and Cohen have a lot in common—if eBay is Cohen’s CBS moment, Cohen got there at a slightly younger age than Turner did. But in others, they sharply diverge.

Love or hate Turner, he built his empire by taking bold risks with business moves that others were too nervous to try themselves. He acquired companies, yes, but he also built essential things from the ground up, like CNN. He helped give Atlanta a modern identity and a voice in the conversation, along with the roots of one of the strongest film industry epicenters in the country.

Cohen has taken bold risks, too, but much of his power is centralized in the stock market. His motivation for buying eBay seems far different from the motivation that drove Turner. When I heard about the proposed buyout, I immediately expressed skepticism and wondered if there might be a gas leak at GameStop HQ.

(Part of the reason for this: Cohen treats companies like financial instruments that can be optimized and tweaked for maximum stock market value. He’s an investor first, CEO second.)

CNN’s Turner obit was in the can long enough that it features an extended interview with Jimmy Carter, someone who died over a year ago. (Turner was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in 2018.)

But looking at the deal in context of what Turner did is forcing me to check my priors a little. If I was looking at Ted’s wheeling and dealing in 1985, would I feel differently about it? Is there actually a point to such audacious bets?

(And it’s to be noted that Turner himself got burned by an audacious bet like this, with the AOL Time Warner merger, when the Turner-owning Time Warner played CBS to AOL’s Ted Turner.)

Ryan Cohen I’m sure is a fine entrepreneur, and entrepreneurship is a game of bets. But I wonder if he should study up on Ted Turner’s career before he dives into the deep water of an eBay acquisition any further.

There was always a logic to Turner’s decision-making even when it led to weird places like Captain Planet. It wasn’t always about the stock price. It might have been meeting another goal for him. That style of business feels old-school in an era when it’s literally possible for a company whose product everyone has been using for decades can see a 4,000% jump in value just because it’s indirectly attached to AI.

The logic needs to be more than about stock price.