In 1989 he co-founded (with Cem Uzan) Turkey's first private television station, "Magic Box" (now Star TV).

[1] Özal was elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1999[2] as an independent; he joined the Motherland Party in 2002,[3] and was the party's candidate for Mayor of Istanbul in the March 2009 local elections (gaining less than 1% of the vote).

[4] Since taking public office, he has adamantly stated that he feels his late father, former Turkish President and Prime Minister Turgut Özal, was assassinated.

[5] He has suggested that the Soviet Union might have been responsible, because of Turgut's efforts to unite the Turkic republics of Central Asia.

[6] In 2013 Özal said that several months before the 1988 assassination attempt on Turgut, Turgut had survived a plane incident in which his official plane lost an engine and crash-landed (Ahmet was on board at the time).