The Sure Thing | The New Yorker

What successful entrepreneurs have in common.

Save this story Save this story Successful entrepreneurs are seen as bold gamblers; in reality, they’re highly risk-averse. Illustration by Jean-François Martin In 1969, Ted Turner wanted to buy a television station. He was thirty years old. He had inherited a billboard business from his father, which was doing well. But he was bored, and television seemed exciting. “He knew absolutely nothing about it,” one of Turner’s many biographers, Christian Williams, writes in “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way” (1981). “It would be fun to risk everything he had built, scare the hell out of everybody,

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