RIP, Ted Turner.

Turner died at age 87 while surrounded by his family, according to Turner Enterprises, which oversees his vast businesses and investments. A cause was not released. He was diagnosed in 2018 with Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurological disorder.

A Southerner with outspoken wit, he earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South” during his youthful years.

“If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect,” he once bragged.

Turner was a celebrity in his own right when he married actor Jane Fonda in 1991, just before being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

“He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same,” Fonda wrote Wednesday on Instagram.

Slowed late in life by his illness and long out of the television business, Turner concentrated on philanthropy — donating a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities — and his more than 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.

After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the Turner Advertising company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a signal so weak it didn’t even cover Atlanta.

On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became TBS Superstation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said.

TBS’ collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves, which slowly attracted fans across the nation and declared themselves “America’s team.”

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said Turner transformed how fans experience sports.

In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, another move greeted with skepticism.

But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually launched the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to appeal to a younger audience.

TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the Cartoon Network.

“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”

Asked to share the secret to his success, Turner said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”

Of course, he also famously had a one-minute video prepped and readied to go on air at any time, if it meant that the world was about to end. It’s a band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee”.

I’ve heard the funeral will likely be held at 7:05 pm, and in the case of rain, reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show” will air.

Thanks for the memories, Ted, and thanks for the years of free and reliable Braves Baseball. A life well lived.