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NetJets’ first fatal crash kills influential Texas VC founder
NetJets says it will not speculate on what caused one of its planes to crash onto a highway in Laredo, Texas late Tuesday, killing a prominent tech entrepreneur.
Joshua Baer was the 50-year-old founder of Capital Factory, a VC company in Austin that specializes in tech startups.
NetJets did say in a statement, “Safety is, and has always been, the foundation of everything we do.” It will “cooperate fully” with investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board.
It is the first fatal crash for the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, and the first for any company that provides fractional ownership of private jets, a business model NetJets originated in 1986 before it was acquired by Berkshire in 1998.
The Cessna Citation Latitude plane was traveling from San José del Cabo, a resort city in Mexico, to Austin when its pilots reported it was low on fuel and asked for an emergency landing at Laredo’s airport.
Firefighters at the site of a NetJets plane crash in Laredo, Texas, June 16, 2026.
Laredo Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
Reports and videos from the scene show bystanders helping to rescue the two pilots and three teenaged passengers who survived.
Laredo’s mayor told reporters, “While the loss of life is deeply regrettable, it is nothing short of a miracle that this tragedy did not become a mass fatality event.”
A witness described the scene for CNN as her husband joined the rescue effort.
Former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti tells the AP the final minutes of the flight suggest it was trying to glide into Laredo’s airport after both engines lost power. “I think they just ran out of altitude and airspeed toward the end there.”
Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Transportation Department speculates to the AP there may may have been a fuel leak since the jet’s 3000 miles range is around three times the distance of its planned flight.
The NTSB says the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are being sent to Washington for analysis.
Google’s parent edges out Coca-Cola for third place in Berkshire’s equity portfolio
Berkshire Hathaway has not yet told us whether it has actually purchased the $10 billion of Alphabet shares it agreed to buy directly from Google’s parent in a deal announced on June 1.
But if those new shares are combined with its holdings of GOOGL and GOOG as of March 31, as disclosed by Berkshire in its Q1 13F filing with the SEC last month, their total market value is now slightly more than Berkshire’s long-time stake in Coca-Cola that Warren Buffett purchased after the 1987 market crash.
Here’s the math:
Alphabet’s news release said Berkshire had agreed to buy $5 billion of its Class A shares (GOOGL) for $351.81 each and $5 billion of its Class C shares (GOOG) for $348.20 each.
That works out to more than 14 million shares of each class:
Adding the new shares to the existing holdings gives Berkshire 68.5 million Class A shares and 17.9 million Class C shares:
Using Thursday’s closing prices, the Class A shares are valued at just under $25.2 billion and the Class C shares are worth almost $6.6 billion for a total of $31.79 billion:
That puts Alphabet into third place in Berkshire’s equity portfolio by a razor-thin margin of $34 million ahead of Coke:
Last Friday, Coca-Cola was ahead by almost $2 billion, but its shares fell nearly 4% this week while Alphabet gained close to 2%.
Famous footballer recounts embarrassing conversation with ‘Buffett’
Jimmy Buffett with Warren Buffett at the 2016 Berkshire meeting.
Lacy O’Toole | CNBC
In what appears to be an outtake from his “New Heights” podcast that was posted on Instagram this week, Travis Kelce, an extremely well-known football player for the Kansas City Chiefs who is planning to marry pop star Taylor Swift, possibly next month, recounted what he called an embarrassing encounter with a man he thought was Warren Buffett:
I have face blindness. You guys know I have face blindness?
Yeah, well, this is an episode of face blindness.
I go to — I go to New York, and there’s a huge festival, a music festival, out in the Hamptons, and I’m a huge music lover, as you guys know. (Applause)
And I go with a bunch of guys from New York in the money world, so it’s like a connection and like, finances and I’m thinking that I’m going to be around a bunch of guys in finances at this music festival.
So, I get up there and I immediately start having beverages, which is kind a thing, the Kelce way of going about things.
And I get shit faced. (Laughter)
Get shit faced. Don’t even really know who’s on, who’s performing at the concert. I’m just kind of up there, like, hey, you got any more tequila? (Laughter)
And a guy comes up and says, “Dude. Buffett’s here. He wants to meet you.”
I’m like, “Holy shit. That’s big money.” (Laughter)
“My god, I’m way too hammered to say hello to this guy and start talking finances.”
I got to go — get it together — get a water, where’s the water, where’s the water?
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (87) runs the ball in for a touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during the first quarter at Raymond James Stadium, Oct. 2, 2022.
Kim Klement | USA Today Sports | Reuters
So, I get a water, I go over to meet Buffett. I shake his hand and man, we have the best conversation I’ve ever had in my life. The man is literally smiling from ear to ear.
I’m thinking I’m going to be rich here soon. He’s going to (unintelligible) these investments.
And he’s starts telling this story in high school when he picked up the guitar for the first time. (Laughter)
And I was like, right to his face, “No way! Warren Buffett played the guitar?” (Laughter and applause)
And his face went from smiling ear to ear to not smiling at all.
And then he got tapped on the shoulder because he had to go sing Margaritaville. (Laughter and applause)
So, I was his biggest cheerleader singing Margaritaville on the side.
So, I have an episode of face blindness at least once a month, and that was my — that was me mistaking Jimmy Buffett — the late, great, unbelievable Jimmy Buffett for — thinking Warren Buffett was going to be at a music festival in the Hamptons. (Laughter)
That’s probably the most embarrassing story I have for you guys.
There is no family relationship between the two Buffetts but they were friends, referring to themselves as “Cousin Warren” and “Cousin Jimmy.”
Jimmy Buffett regularly attended Berkshire’s annual meeting, even opening the 2007 gathering with a rendition of “Margaritaville” featuring rewritten lyrics about “Wasting away in Berkshire Hathaway-a-ville / Searchin’ for some good companies to buy.”
He died of a rare form of skin cancer in 2023 at the age of 76.
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
How NetJets cost Berkshire hundreds of millions of dollars (2010)
Warren Buffett outlines the mistakes made at NetJets, Berkshire’s aviation subsidiary. But he and Charlie Munger say they will generally continue to trust the managers of their subsidiaries.
WARREN BUFFETT: The biggest mistake made with NetJets is essentially we kept — we were buying planes at prices that were fictitious, in terms of the price at which we would later be able to sell them. And there’s a certain time lapse involved in buying fractional shares.
There’s a lot of explanations for it. But in the end, we didn’t properly prepare for what was obviously happening. And we lost a lot of money, a good bit of which was attributable to the write-down of planes, which you could call is our inventory, where we bought them at X and we couldn’t sell them at X or 90 percent of X.
Some of those were new planes that we should not have taken on, and many of them were planes coming back from owners.
We also let our operating costs get out of line with recurring revenues.
But, you know, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. I stayed in the textile business for 20 years. I knew it was a lousy business. Charlie was telling me it was a lousy business in the first year, the second year.
And 20 years later, I woke up. I was like Rip Van Winkle. I mean, it’s kind of depressing when you think about it. (Laughter)
But the one thing we will guarantee, we’ll make some mistakes. It was a big mistake at NetJets, $711 million is the figure…
CHARLIE MUNGER: If we buy 30 big businesses and generally let the people who run them successfully in — before, run them with very little interference from headquarters, and it works out 95 percent of the time very well, and we have one episode when the basic franchise was protected but we lost profit opportunities for a while, it’s not a big failure record.
Nor does it indicate that we should stop being pretty easy with the remarkable people who join us with their companies.
WARREN BUFFETT: No, it is not going to change — it does not change our management approach at all.
I think that we have gotten performance, overall, from managers that are beyond the dreams I would have had when I was first putting this company together.
So, it’s been a — we let managers do their stuff.
BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH
BRK.A stock price: $733,609.77
BRK.B stock price: $489.46
BRK.B P/E (TTM): 14.57
Berkshire market capitalization: $1,055,405,905,430
Berkshire Cash as of March 31: $397.4 billion (Up 6.5% from Dec. 31)
Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $380.2 billion (Up 3.0% from Dec. 31)
Berkshire repurchased $234 million of its shares in Q1 2026.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise indicated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS – Jun. 19, 2026
Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.
U.S. stock markets are closed today, Friday, for Juneteenth National Independence Day.
Holdings are as of March 31, 2026, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on May 15, 2026, except for:
- Alphabet, which includes the $10 billion in shares that Berkshire agreed to buy directly from the company, as announced on June 1, 2026. Berkshire has not yet formally disclosed whether the transaction has been completed. The entry is a combination of Class A and Class C Alphabet shares. The market price is a weighted average of the prices of the two classes.
- Mitsubishi, which is as of April 30, 2026
The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at [email protected]. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
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Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
