Ted Turner regrets losing his job at Time Warner, his wife, Jane Fonda, and $7 billion of his fortune. In a Bloomberg interview out yesterday he also says we’ll get out of Afghanistan:

“War is obsolete…The last time someone surrendered was Japan and that was 60 years ago. The Afghans will never surrender. We will just get tired and come home. We’ve already given up on Iraq and there’s oil in Iraq, there’s no oil in Afghanistan.”

Always colorfully quotable, the man who pledged a billion dollars in 1997 to establish the United Nations Foundation compares his charitable giving to passing around a joint:

“If you were around at the time, I gave everybody a hundred thousand dollars if they came up with anything,” Turner said. “I just couldn’t hold onto it. I wanted to keep it moving. I get a dollar, I give it to you, you spend it, somebody else gets it. You know, pass it around. You know, it’s kind of like a joint — you just pass it around, light it up, you know, share with your friends.”

The CNN founder and Atlanta billionaire has dropped to number 196 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. Balloon Juice’s DougJ chooses to quote Ted joking about losing billions. As does Jerome Armstrong.

Turner remains a business man I admire, both for his media innovations and for his philanthropy.