I found out Ted Turner died the way most of the UN family did—through a LinkedIn post from the Secretary-General.

What was meant to be a quick check of LinkedIn, turned into a pause that led to this post.

Most people know Ted Turner because of CNN, or TNT, or TBS—be it for the programming he brought to millions of Americans or the particular audacity of a man who decided to launch a twenty-four-hour news network at a moment when everyone told him it was a terrible idea.

He built something that changed the world, and not entirely for the better.

Can I also say, that the twenty-four-hour news cycle is arguably one of the worst things to happen to human mental health in the last fifty years—right up there with social media.

But for me, Ted Turner was not about CNN or Jane Fonda or the Tomahawk chop: I knew about Ted Turner because when I was a kid growing up in New Mexico, he owned what felt like half of it. His Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico comprised more than 500,000 acres and is one of the two largest contiguous private land holdings in the country. A property of that size ceases to be something one comprehends as property but instead, becomes simply a fact of the landscape, not unlike the clarity of the sky or the shade of pink that gives the Sandia Mountains their name.

Later, I came to understand what that actually meant. The case for lauding Turner as a conservationist is genuinely compelling—he bought degraded, overgrazed land and restored it. He brought back the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. He ran bison herds. He took stewardship seriously in ways that many landowners don't. I will give him that.

I will also note that I cannot afford to stay at his ranch. The all-inclusive resort on Vermejo starts at around $1,500 a night—not a price I plan paying anytime soon.

Turner wasn’t the first billionaire to buy land in New Mexico, and he was not the last. The billionaires who followed him—buying up ranches across New Mexico and the Mountain West, driving land values through the roof, turning Santa Fe from an artist colony into a luxury destination—they saw what he did and they wanted a piece of it. The pattern he helped establish pushed out the families and communities that had been there for generations. Some of them looked a lot like mine.

He was also a man who defended the Tomahawk Chop long past the point where any self-aware person should have. He was not a simple man, and I am not going to pretend he was.

But that is not what this post is about.

Later in my life—I am not even sure exactly when—I learned that Ted Turner had done something that I would come to understand, much later still, was genuinely extraordinary.

In 1997, he gave a billion dollars to the United Nations. Not to a specific UN agency. Not to a program or a project. To the United Nations itself, which at the time was effectively impossible to do if you were not a member state.

Instead of throwing up his hands when faced with this impossibility, he built the infrastructure to make it possible. He founded the United Nations Foundation specifically because there was no mechanism for private philanthropy to flow to the UN. He looked at a broken system and instead of complaining about it, he wrote a check large enough to build a workaround.

I thought about that a lot when I first learned it. The particular combination of audacity and pragmatism it takes to do something like that. To see a structural problem and decide that the solution is just to fund your way around it.

I thought about it again this morning, sitting at my desk in Vienna, working on the very problem he was trying to solve in 1997.

It is still extraordinarily difficult to donate directly to the UN.

Nearly 30 years later, the problem Ted Turner saw clearly enough to give a billion dollars to address is still not solved. The UN Foundation exists and does important work, but it is not the simple conduit people imagine it to be. The architecture of international public finance is complicated in ways that would take more than one blog post to explain, and probably more patience than most readers have. What I can tell you is that this is my professional life—finding ways to bring private resources into multilateral systems that were not designed to receive them—and that I think about Ted Turner's original insight more often than he probably would have expected anyone to.

His other legacy also sits close to my life, in a different way.

Ted Turner founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2001. My husband made nuclear non-proliferation his raison d'être since before I knew him—it is not an exaggeration to say he wanted to work on this topic since he was about twelve years old, and that working at the IAEA was his dream, and that he made it there. I came along for the ride, which is how I ended up in Vienna, which is how I ended up at the UN, which is how I ended up working on the problem Ted Turner spent a billion dollars trying to fix.

I have always wanted to work for NTI. I have deep respect for the people there—people like former Ambassador Laura Holgate, whose career is the kind I look at and think: yes, that. The work they do on nuclear security sits at the intersection of everything my husband has given his professional life to, and everything I believe about what multilateral institutions are actually for.

Ted Turner built that too.

I never planned to work at the United Nations. I want to say that clearly, because I know what a statement like that means to people—I live with someone for whom it was the dream, the specific destination he worked toward for years. For me it was different. My life took a detour, and then another detour, and I found myself here, working on problems I did not know existed when I was a kid in Gallup watching the news on a Turner network and dimly aware that some man in Atlanta owned a significant portion of my state.

I doubt Ted Turner ever thought about the specific ripple effects of his choices on the life of a Navajo girl from New Mexico. The land he bought. The foundation he built. The institution he decided to bet on when a lot of people were betting against it.

But here I am.

That is the thing about people who operate at that scale—the ones who build infrastructure rather than just write checks, who see broken systems and decide to fix the architecture rather than work around it. They shape lives they never meet. They create conditions for careers they never imagined. They make bets on institutions and the bets compound in ways they cannot see.

Ted Turner made a bet on the United Nations at a moment when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. Twenty-eight years later, I am still working inside the infrastructure he helped build, trying to finish what he started.

Rest well, Mr. Turner. The work you started continues.

The views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the positions of the United Nations, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or any other organization with which I am affiliated.