Actually Ted Turner made WCW very profitable... It was only after he sold Turner Networks to AOL/Time Warner that the product turned to shit.
I respectfully disagree.
Turner's biggest problem is that he didn't understand the wrestling business, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself. But, he never even got involved enough in his own company to learn or even just know what was going on, and instead appointed other people from non-wrestling backgrounds to run it. They, in turn, continued to hire & fill higher positions with either people who had no clue how to run & operate a wrestling company, or people like Ole Anderson and Bill Watts, who had an extensive, but outdated wrestling background. Jim Herd was a former CEO of Pizza Hut and actually fired Flair - the company's hottest draw at the time!
There were so many people who made bad moves in WCW over the years, but particularly towards the end of its run. A lot of critics point the finger at Bischoff, Russo, Bill Busch, Dr. Harvey Schiller, etc. But, somebody had to okay that stuff, and in my book,
that's the person most responsible. Turner sold his Turner Broadcasting
(and WCW) to Time Warner some time in 1996, but Ted remained the Time Warner majority shareholder until the AOL merger in January 2001. Turner allowed WCW to continue operating at annual losses of up to $17 million; reportedly because he had a loyalty to the promotion since it was one of the first original programs that helped his TBS station take off.
Almost immediately following the merger, new Time Warner head Jamie Kellner announced the cancellation of all WCW programming.
