It's safe to say Ted Turner holds a grudge.

Interviewed this morning at the Time/Life Building by Time magazine's Josh Tyrangiel, the swashbuckling CNN founder took every opportunity to bash his former company over the head, blasting Gerald Levin and Dick Parsons, excoriating Time and CNN, and comparing the merger of Time Warner and AOL to the development of the atomic bomb in its tragic impact. (Parts of the interview, which was timed to promote Turner's autobiography, will appear in next week's issue of Time and on the magazine's website; it will be awfully interesting to see just which parts.)

Afterward, talking to a group of Time Inc. employees, he said, "It gave me a chance to get a few things off my chest." No kidding.

Some highlights that only could've come from the Mouth of the South:

-Turner, who has lost the vast majority of his fortune and given away most of the rest, said he intends to make fresh billions by investing in clean energy. And what will he do with it? "I might buy Time [Warner] back, because it might be two dollars a share by then. When I left it was eighteen."

He then addressed the audience: "How many people lost money on their Time Warner stock?" Many hands went up. "How many people think I could've done a worse job than the management did? I got asked that question last night and I said I don't think I could've done any worse, that's for sure."

-On former AOL Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin: "He told me once I was his best friend and I said, 'Jerry I've never been over to your house for dinner. How could I be your best friend?' It wasn't hard to figure how I could be his best friend. He doesn't have a whole lot. Is anybody here friends with Jerry Levin?

Later, he said that Levin had tried to forestall his resignation by offering him $1 million a year at a time when the company was laying off workers. "

"I told him, 'You take your million dollars and shove it up your ass. For you to offer me the shareholders' money, to offer me a million a year to do nothing when you're letting people go because you say you can't afford to pay their wages -- how can you love a company like that?' [Addressing the audience] Do you think that's right? I know the difference between right and wrong and some of those people did not."

-Turner was asked what one thing in his life he would like to have done differently. He said it would've been to insist that Time Warner do more homework before entering the AOL merger. "Their earnings were overstated, see? So we were buying damaged goods and paying outrageous prices. [Addressing Time Inc. editor in chief John Huey] Huey, am I right or not? They cooked the books on us. Of course, we only did one day of due diligence, but that wasn't my fault."

Turner, who has donated millions to fighting nuclear proliferation, concluded, "So it would've been trying to stop the AOL-Time Warner merger, and also the detonation of the atomic bomb."

-He criticized Time Warner for shutting down CNNfn without bothering to try to sell it. "It was in half the homes and it was breaking even, and they closed it down without even calling Rupert Murdoch. He would've bought it for two hundred or three hundred million, he told me over lunch."

-He lambasted CNN for shutting the environmental reporting unit he had created and for scaling back its international reporting, and said his single biggest quarrel with Time Warner was that it no longer airs Captain Planet, the cartoon series he dreamed up starring an eco-friendly superhero, on the Cartoon Network.

-Turner also revealed that he had long anticipated that Murdoch or someone else would launch a conservative-oriented network to challenge CNN. His plan, he said, was to head it off by re-positioning CNN Headline News as conservative. "And when the time came that Fox News started, we were making so much money and doing so well that I said I'm not going to do it."

-He even used a question about the auto industry to slam Time Warner. "Where are they going to get better management? Dick Parsons or Steve Case [the two previous Time Warner chairmen]? They don't know much about the media business, either."

-Still, he insisted, "I love the company and I wish the company the very best. If I can make peace with Murdoch I can make peace here. But I am hurt. I'll go to my grave hurt because in my opinion it was so stupid and so wrong."

-"The two things that make men commit suicide the most often are losing their job and losing their wife. And I lost them both in the same year, along with $7 billion."

-"My father said, 'Son, when the communists take over, they're going to shoot everyone with more than 50 dollars.' And for 30 years I never carried more than 49 dollars."

-Turner defended prairie dogs against the calumny that they are a danger to cows, who stumble into their burrow holes. "Cows don't fall in the holes. That's a bunch of beans."