NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Ted Turner unloaded more than half his stake in AOL Time Warner Monday, the media company said, cutting further his financial ties to the company that runs the news organization he founded: CNN.

Turner sold 60 million shares for $13.07 each, raising $784 million, according to an AOL Time Warner spokeswoman, in a sale that amounted to about a third of his net worth, using calculations from Forbes magazine.

Ted Turner

But the divestiture by Turner, who has been critical of the 2001 purchase of Time Warner by America Online, doesn't mean he will disappear from company affairs. The 64-year-old, who remains AOL Time Warner's largest individual shareholder, plans to stay on the company's board.

Turner told AOL Time Warner he sold the 50 million shares to diversify his financial holdings, according to a company statement. Turner, who held about 105 million shares before the sale, also transferred 10 million AOL shares to a charitable trust. These were also sold, AOL said.

Turner, the nation's largest private landowner, had a net worth of $2.2 billion last year, ranking him 80th on Forbes magazine's tally of the richest Americans.

Shares of AOL Time Warner (AOL: Research, Estimates), the parent company of CNN/Money, fell 22 cents to $13.16 Tuesday morning.

Turner has unloaded AOL shares before, selling about $133 million worth in January and February, government filings showed. That was after he announced plans to give up his vice chairman position at AOL Time Warner, whose stock fell 59 percent last year.

The decline has meant millions of dollars in paper losses for Turner and came during a year when AOL Time Warner suffered a big loss of its own: A record $98.7 billion. Most of that figure came from charges at the AOL unit, whose growth has slowed and whose accounting is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Published reports have cited Turner for criticizing everything from the direction of CNN to the decisions of AOL Timer Warner's former CEO, Gerald Levin, and its former chairman, Steve Case. The two men announced America Online's purchase of Time Warner on Jan 10, 2000, weeks before the stock market began a three-year slide.

The new company that was supposed to combine the distribution power of America Online's Internet service with Time Warner's media properties like CNN, Sports Illustrated and People has resulted in big hits for former Time Warner shareholders, whose shares were worth $93 each right after the company offered itself for sale.

Monday's statement from AOL Time Warner touched on Turner's relationship with the company by saying that he "remains supportive of management and has voted in line with management's recommendations on every item scheduled for vote at the upcoming annual meeting for shareholders."

That meeting is scheduled for May 16.

The statement also said that Turner has ended his stock-selling program that was in place since last year.

Turner founded CNN in 1980 and went on to become the largest AOL Time Warner shareholder through his sale of Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner in 1996 and AOL's subsequent acquisition of Time Warner.

Monday's sale leaves Turner with about 45 million shares in AOL worth $594 million based on the current price.

That's enough shares to maintain Turner as the company's largest individual shareholder, according to company spokesperson Tricia Primrose. Turner, she says, still owns 1 percent of the 4.5 billion AOL Time Warner shares outstanding. He sold the stock to Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Journal reported.