When I learned that Ted Turner had died, I felt unexpectedly sad.

I met Ted several times during the 1990s, mostly around the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. The first time may have been at a party or event where he was with his then wife, Jane Fonda. Like many people, I already knew of Ted Turner long before I met him. By then he was already a legend, the founder of CNN, owner of the Atlanta Braves, media mogul, environmentalist, and one of the largest landowners in America. But what struck me wasn’t his fame. It was his presence.

Ted Turner was not polished in the modern corporate sense. He did not feel media-trained, rehearsed, or carefully calibrated. He felt authentic, impulsive, funny, competitive, and very alive. He had enormous energy. When you were around him, you felt it.

Today many executives sound interchangeable. Their language is cautious, optimized, and professionally sanitized. Ted came from another era, an era when entrepreneurs often looked and behaved like the companies they built: messy, ambitious, emotional, unpredictable and bigger than life.

Ted Turner represented a type of entrepreneur that may be disappearing. Before CNN, the idea of a 24-hour news network sounded absurd. The major networks thought nobody would watch news all day. Ted ignored them and built it anyway.

Ted has been replaced by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. While they are certainly capable of building great companies, they are no match for the personality of Turner. They also seem to lack some of his character.

Ted could be outrageous and thoughtful, bombastic and vulnerable, deeply competitive yet deeply committed to causes larger than himself. He amassed enormous wealth, yet spent much of his later life focused on conservation and restoring bison herds across his ranches.

People like Ted are hard to categorize because they were never only one thing.

As I get older, I realize that what I miss most about certain eras is not the technology or even the business opportunities. It is the personalities. The people who entered a room and altered its energy. Ted Turner was one of those people. What I remember most now is his smile.

Strangely, over the last ten years, I would occasionally run into Jane Fonda in Los Angeles. Every time, it would bring Ted back into my mind for a moment recalling Sun Valley, the media world of the 1990s, the giant personalities of that era.