It's Good to Give, Says Billionaire

It's good to give, says one of the planet's biggest philanthropists, but don't forget to keep a tidy sum for that rainy day.

"Keep a few hundred million at least, because you never know," CNN founder Ted Turner told a conference on philanthropy, this week, in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Things could get really tough."

"I've got to be careful I don't give everything and be a poor, destitute old man, which would be really sad," the former Mr Jane Fonda said.

Mr Turner, who is ranked as the world's 382nd richest person with a fortune estimated at $2bn(£1bn) according to Forbes latest list of billionaires, helped create the United Nations Foundation in 1998 as a way to distribute $1bn he pledged to the organisation.

At the conference on innovative philanthropy, sponsored by the online magazine Slate, Mr Turner also said that he would rather work with philanthropists than politicians.

"I'd rather be here than with a bunch of Nazis planning to kill people or at the Pentagon figuring who they're going to bomb next, Afghanistan or Iraq," Mr Turner, who is known as 'the mouth of the south', told his audience of 300 philanthropists. "At least we're bombing people with funds and good will. If our country used some of the same philosophy in this room, it would be a hell of a lot better world than we're living in now."

"I go around making friends with everybody ... and this administration goes around making enemies with everybody we've worked ... to make friends with," Mr Turner said. "It seems like we're going backwards."

As well as being known as the founder of cable news, Mr Turner is the largest private landowner in the US, with about 2 million acres to his name.