Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act created allowed parents and other authorized individuals to open tax-advantaged savings accounts for any child under 18 with a Social Security number.

During a panel discussion at the Milken Institute’s Global Summit on Monday, Cruz pointed out he wrote that part of the legislation, noting that half of Americans don’t own stocks and can’t benefit from decades of compounding growth.

For 50 years, he added, U.S. conservatives have been trying to mimic Australia’s superannuation program, which requires employers to pay into an employee’s investment fund to be accessed upon retirement as a way to reduce reliance on public pensions. Cruz described a U.S. version as Social Security personal accounts.

“Here’s the dirty little secret: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts,” he said.

Republicans tried to make changes to Social Security during President George W. Bush’s second term but retreated amid pushback on the politically charged topic.

Retirees and soon-to-be retirees have long been a potent voting bloc that instill fear in lawmakers, especially those contemplating any adjustments to Social Security and Medicare.

“How did we get it done this time? Because we gave the money to babies and so the old people didn’t get pissed,” Cruz said. 

The White House has estimated that fully funded Trump accounts could eventually grow to as much as $1.9 million by the time a child turns 28.

Cruz said that as parents see their kids’ Trump accounts surge, they will become more open to changing how their own payroll taxes are spent.

“Wouldn’t you like to be able to keep a portion of your tax payments that you’re paying already, and instead of sending it to Uncle Sam, wouldn’t you like to have a Trump account just like your kid does?” he added. “And my prediction is within five years, that is going to have a really compelling constituency because people will have seen it, and that is I think powerful and transformational.”

But that is where politics come into play. Social Security benefits are funded by workers currently paying payroll taxes, meaning diverting today’s tax payments would affect today’s retirees.

At the same time, the U.S. debt has eclipsed GDP with the outlook deteriorating on the back of soaring entitlement spending and exploding interest expenses.

Social Security tax revenue is already insufficient to cover benefits, with the difference currently bridged by the Social Security trust fund. But the trust fund projected to run out of money by 2034.

Without any changes to the program to raise additional revenue, benefits would have be slashed immediately to match the money that’s coming in, after the trust fund becomes insolvent.

For his part, President Donald Trump has vowed not to touch Social Security benefits. Instead, his One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced the amount of income taxes recipients pay on their benefits.

Meanwhile, the White House has described the Trump accounts as a way to build wealth and get a head start on saving for retirement.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last year called the accounts “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security” but quickly clarified that they instead add to benefits alongside Social Security.

For now, Trump accounts will likely become a ubiquitous workplace benefit, just like 401k accounts, with employers matching employees’ contributions, Cruz said.

“Relatively speaking, it’s a pretty inexpensive employee benefit,” he added. “But the benefit over time is massive.”

“At 75, how much longer will I live? Till 80 maybe?” the CNN founder told Fortune‘s Pattie Sellers in a wide-ranging 2013 interview marking his 75th birthday. When Sellers pushed back—why not 90?—Turner allowed it was “a possibility,” but said he was “talking about practically.” It was, he explained, why he wouldn’t start anything new: “75 is too late to be starting new ventures. Particularly ones that take many years to reach fruition. I wouldn’t want to start anything without having a reasonable chance of seeing it be successful before I die or am incapacitated.”

Turner died Wednesday at 87, according to a statement from Turner Enterprises—nearly a decade past the deadline he’d given himself, and just shy of the milestone he’d half-dismissed.

He spent those bonus years much as he’d spent the decade before: warning anyone who would listen that humanity was running out of time. The man who built the first 24-hour news network, who put $1 billion into the United Nations Foundation, who created an eco-focused Saturday morning cartoon called Captain Planet, and who co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with former Senator Sam Nunn, used his late-life platform to sound an unrelenting alarm about nuclear weapons, climate change, and overpopulation.

In 2003, Turner told Fortune he believed the chances were “50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years.” A decade later, sitting in his Atlanta office with a freshly installed pacemaker, he wasn’t backing off. “Fifty years aren’t up yet,” he told Sellers. “I’d say that’s generally the case. The nuclear threat is the most imminent threat. But global climate change and environmental destruction of the earth and our resource base, that’s the other great threat.”

His prescription for the population problem was characteristically Turner: blunt and slightly impolitic, but impossible to ignore. He wanted the world to drop from [then] roughly 7 billion people to 2.5 billion, achieved voluntarily through family planning. He told Sellers he had encouraged his own five children—and 13 grandchildren—to have fewer kids of their own.

On faith, he was equally direct. Turner had drifted from the Christianity of his youth after watching his sister Mary Jean suffer and die at 17. By 75, he called himself agnostic, though he still offered up what he called “mini-prayers” for sick friends. “If God’s going to save us, it’s time for him to show up,” he told Fortune. “We’re not showing evidence that we’re ready to save ourselves. That’s what bothers me.”

Turner’s media legacy

The 2013 interview also captured Turner taking stock of his media legacy with the candor of a man who figured he didn’t have time to be diplomatic. He called the AOL-Time Warner merger an outright “disaster” (he lost $8 billion when the stock plummeted), lamented the planned spin-off of Time Inc., and predicted that Time Warner, without him, had been shortsighted compared to Rupert Murdoch, who had held on to his sports and news properties. “They might as well rename it Turner Broadcasting,” he said of what was left.

His verdict on Murdoch himself? The same one he’d delivered to Fortune a decade earlier: “the most dangerous man in the world.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “But he’s getting too old.” Murdoch, now 95, outlived him.

Asked in 2013 what he was proudest of, Turner named his children first and CNN second—though he noted, with a flicker of the old showman, that the Cartoon Network actually beat CNN in the ratings most days. “We like to laugh,” he said. “If you get people laughing, there’s a good chance you’ll win them over. Very seldom do people kill somebody when they’re laughing. And there’s plenty of killing going on now.”

He never did start that next big venture. He stuck with what he had: 2 million acres, 55,000 bison, a restaurant chain called Ted’s Montana Grill, and philanthropy. By the time of the 2013 interview, he had paid $973 million of the $1 billion he’d pledged to the U.N. He kept funding the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and kept buying solar.

The five-year horizon he’d given himself in 2013 came and went. So did 80. So did 85. The warnings kept coming.

Read Fortune‘s full 2013 interview with Ted Turner here: Ted Turner at 75

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

Cruz, the chairman of the Commerce Committee and a frequent defender of the Trump administration, took to his podcast in the wake of Kimmel’s indefinite suspension this week to describe Carr’s actions as “dangerous.” 

Carr earlier in the week implied on another podcast that ABC could face serious consequences from the government over Kimmel’s remarks about the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Only hours later, ABC pulled Kimmel’s show. 

Cruz said he doesn’t believe the government should punish media companies over political disagreements. 

“I like Brendan Carr, he’s a good guy,” Cruz said on his podcast, which was taped late Thursday. “But what he said there is dangerous as hell.” 

“That’s right outta ‘Goodfellas,’ that’s right out of a mafioso going into a bar saying, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” Cruz said, using the iconic New York accent associated with the Mafia. “If the government gets in the business of saying ‘We don’t like what you the media have said, we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives.”

Throughout the podcast, Cruz emphasized he disagreed with Kimmel’s comments, which he called “reprehensible.” But he said a defamation case would have been a better approach than Carr’s intervention.

“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but if it is used to silence every person in America, we will regret it,” Cruz said. “I like Brendan Carr but we should not be in this business.”

Trump rejected Cruz’s criticism of the FCC chair.

“I think Brendan Carr is a great American patriot. So I disagree with Ted Cruz,” Trump told reporters later Friday during an event in the Oval Office.

Cruz and Kimmel have their own history. 

The Texas US senator challenged Kimmel to a one-on-one basketball game after the comedian mocked his appearance during a show. Kimmel accepted, with the proceeds from the 2018 event going to charities the two men chose.

In a brief interview in the US Capitol on Friday, Cruz noted the FCC falls under his committee’s jurisdiction even as he took a swing at the other party. 

“When the Democrats had the majority they did not engage in oversight,” he said. “We will do our job and engage in oversight.” 

Republican Senator Thom Tillis, a moderate who is not running for reelection in the swing state of North Carolina, applauded Cruz for taking a stand on what he called “unacceptable” behavior from the administration. 

Cruz “showed a lot of courage, and he will be on the right side of history and he’s definitely on the right side of the law,” Tillis said. 

Most Republican lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, have spent days insisting Disney made its own financial decision by suspending Kimmel and declining to criticize Carr. Carr said the company made its own decision but said there will be more changes to the media ecosystem ahead.

Democrats have uniformly said Carr has violated the First Amendment and have called on Republicans to push back. 

“Republican senators should not want to see a weaponized FCC that can go after conservative commentators by some future administration,” said Senator Adam Schiff of California.

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Washington — Two Senate Republicans on Monday introduced legislation to protect access to in vitro fertilization, known as IVF, after a Democratic-led effort to do so failed earlier this year in the upper chamber.

The bill, titled the IVF Protection Act, was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama. 

It seeks to safeguard IVF nationwide by banning states from receiving Medicaid funding if they enact an outright ban on the fertility procedure. The bill defines IVF as “eggs are collected from ovaries and manually fertilized by sperm, for later placement inside of a uterus.” 

It would not force any individual or organization to provide IVF services, nor would it prevent states from implementing health and safety measures within clinics that provide such services. 

“IVF has given miraculous hope to millions of Americans, and it has given families across the country the gift of children,” Cruz said in a statement Monday. 

Britt said in a statement that the procedure is “pro-family” and that legislation “affirms both life and liberty.” 

Lawmakers have sought to protect the fertility treatment after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are considered children under the law. The Alabama ruling could have major implications on the procedure, and raises questions about whether frozen embryos that are not transferred into a woman’s uterus will have to be stored indefinitely or whether charges could be brought for wrongful death if an embryo does not survive the process. 

Several clinics in Alabama paused IVF treatments after the ruling over fears of legal repercussions if the treatment failed. Alabama has since enacted a law shielding in vitro fertilization providers from potential legal liability. 

The ruling also threatened to become a liability for Republicans as polls showed that most voters think IVF should be legal. 

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois sought to have her bill, the Access to Family Building Act, passed by unanimous consent in February, but it was blocked by Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, who said it was a “vast overreach.” 

Duckworth’s bill would have granted individuals the right to IVF and other fertility treatments and given health care providers the right to provide such care without fear of being prosecuted. The measure also would have allowed insurance providers to cover the costly treatments. 

Cruz claimed in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday that Duckworth’s measure sought to “backdoor in broader abortion legislation” in explaining why it did not have Republican support.