Biography|Ted Turner — The Billion-Dollar Pledge in the Marriott Marquis Ballroom

On the evening of 18 September 1997, about five hundred diplomats and donors sat in the Marriott Marquis on Times Square for the United Nations Association of the USA's annual dinner.

Ted Turner was there to collect the Global Leadership Award. He used the microphone to announce a gift of one billion dollars, spread over ten years, for United Nations humanitarian work.

That afternoon he had told Secretary-General Kofi Annan he was considering the donation. The charter bars the UN from taking money directly from a private person, so the cash would move through a new foundation.

The United Nations Foundation was set up the next year as the vehicle. A sister Better World Fund handled advocacy.

Turner was then vice-chairman of Time Warner, which had absorbed Turner Broadcasting in 1996 for a deal reported at about 7.5 billion dollars. He said the billion represented the rise in his net worth since January of that year, paid in company stock.

Contemporary accounts in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times treated the sum as among the largest single pledges an individual had made.

The hotel is the 1985 John Portman tower at 1535 Broadway, a public banquet address, not a residence. The ballroom still hosts association dinners.

The gift did not erase U.S. arrears to the UN, a hope some diplomats briefly floated. It funded health, refugee, land-mine, and children's programs and was designed to pull other donors in behind it.

Turner chaired the foundation board from 1998. He later called the pledge the best investment he ever made, a line the foundation still prints on its founder page.

A visitor to Times Square is not looking at a UN building. The moment happened in a hotel ballroom because that is where the association put the dinner, and Turner used the award slot to change the scale of private money around the UN.

Photo: New York Marriott Marquis, Basil D Soufi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Bernard Gotfryd, April 1985, public domain, Library of Congress.