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Influential Texas VC founder dies in NetJets’ first fatal accident
NetJets said it would not speculate on what caused its airliner to crash on a freeway in Laredo, Texas, late Tuesday, killing a prominent technology entrepreneur.
Joshua Baer was the 50-year-old founder of Capital Factory, an Austin venture capital firm specializing in high-tech startups.
“Safety has been, and continues to be, the foundation of everything we do,” NetJets said in a statement. It will “fully cooperate” with National Transportation Safety Board investigators.
This is the first fatal crash for a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, and the first for a company that offers fractional ownership of private jets. NetJets was founded in 1986 and offered that business model until it was acquired by Berkshire in 1998.
The Cessna Citation Latitude plane was headed to Austin from the Mexican resort city of San Jose del Cabo when the pilot reported low fuel and called for an emergency landing at Laredo’s airport.
Firefighters at the scene of a NetJets plane crash in Laredo, Texas, June 16, 2026.
Laredo Police Department/Handout via Reuters
Reports and video from the scene show those present helping rescue the two surviving pilots and three teenage passengers.
“While the loss of life is deeply regrettable, it is nothing short of a miracle that this tragedy did not turn into a mass fatality incident,” Laredo’s mayor told reporters.
A witness described to CNN the scene where her husband took part in the rescue effort.
Jeff Gazzetti, a former FAA and NTSB investigator, told The Associated Press that the final minutes of the flight suggested the plane was attempting to glide to Laredo’s airport after both engines lost power. “I think we just ran out of altitude and airspeed towards the end.”
Mary Schiavo, a former U.S. Department of Transportation inspector general, told The Associated Press that the plane’s range of 3,000 miles is about three times the planned range, so she speculated there may have been a fuel leak.
The NTSB said it was sending the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder to Washington for analysis.
Google’s parent company overtakes Coca-Cola to take third place in Berkshire’s stock portfolio
Berkshire Hathaway has not yet said whether it actually bought the $10 billion in Alphabet stock it agreed to buy directly from Google’s parent company in a deal announced on June 1.
But when these new stocks are combined with their holdings, google and google As of March 31, Berkshire’s market capitalization was slightly larger than Berkshire’s long-held holdings, as Berkshire disclosed in its first-quarter 13th filing with the SEC last month. coca cola Bought by Warren Buffett after the 1987 market crash.
The calculation is as follows:
Berkshire has agreed to purchase $5 billion worth of Class A shares (GOOGL) at $351.81 per share and $5 billion worth of Class C shares (GOOG) at $348.20 per share, according to an Alphabet news release.
This amounts to more than 14 million shares in each class.
Adding the new shares to existing holdings, Berkshire will have 68.5 million Class A shares and 17.9 million Class C shares.
Using Thursday’s closing prices, the Class A shares are worth just under $25.2 billion and the Class C shares are worth about $6.6 billion, for a total of $31.79 billion.
This puts Alphabet in third place in Berkshire’s stock portfolio over Coke by $34 million.
Coca-Cola was leading by nearly $2 billion last Friday, but its shares have fallen nearly 4% this week, while Alphabet has risen nearly 2%.
Famous soccer player shares embarrassing conversation with Buffett
Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett at the 2016 Berkshire Meeting.
Lacey O’Toole | CNBC
In what appears to be an excerpt from his podcast “New Heights” posted on Instagram this week, Travis Kelce, the highly famous football player for the Kansas City Chiefs who is likely to marry pop star Taylor Swift next month, talks about an embarrassing encounter he had with a man he thought was Warren Buffett.
I’m face blind. Do you know that I am face blind?
Yes, this is an episode of facial blindness.
I’m going to New York. There’s a big festival, a music festival, in the Hamptons. And as you all know, I’m a huge music lover. (applause)
And I’m going from New York with a lot of people who are in the money world, so I think it’s like a connection, it’s like finance, and I’m going to be with a lot of people who are in the finance world at this music festival.
So I get up there and immediately start drinking. This is a kind thing to do, Kelce’s way of getting things done.
And I’m going to be awful. (laughs)
Face the shit. I don’t even know who’s going to be at the concert or who’s playing. I’m kind of there, but hey, do you have any more tequila? (laughs)
Then a guy comes up and says, “Hey, Buffett’s here. He wants to meet you.”
I’m like, “Oh my god. That’s a lot of money.” (laughs)
“Oh my god, I’m so devastated I can’t even say hello to this guy and start talking about finances.”
I have to go — all together — go get water, where’s the water, where’s the water?
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, 87, drives the ball in for a touchdown during the first quarter of a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium on October 2, 2022.
Kim Clement | USA Today Sports | Reuters
So I buy some water and go see Buffett. I shook his hand and had the best conversation of my life. The man is literally smiling from ear to ear.
I think you can get rich quickly here. He is (unintelligibly) going to make these investments.
And he started this story in high school, when he first picked up a guitar. (laughs)
And I thought to my face, “No way! Warren Buffett was playing guitar?” (Laughter and applause)
And his face went from smiling from ear to ear to not smiling at all.
And 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, at least once a month, I have a bout of facial blindness where I mistook Jimmy Buffett for the late, great, incredibly great Jimmy Buffett, and I thought it was Warren Buffett performing at a music festival in the Hamptons. (laughs)
That’s probably the most embarrassing story I have for you all.
Although the two Buffetts have no family relationship, they were friends and called themselves “Cousin Warren” and “Cousin Jimmy.”
Jimmy Buffett regularly attends Berkshire’s annual meetings, opening the 2007 meeting with a rendition of “Margaritaville,” a rewrite of the lyrics, “Spending money on Berkshire Hathaway A Ville/Looking for good companies to buy.”
He died in 2023 at the age of 76 from a rare form of skin cancer.
Buffett and Berkshire on the Internet
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CNBC’s Buffett Archive Highlights
How NetJets cost Berkshire hundreds of millions of dollars (2010)
Warren Buffett outlines the mistakes he made at NetJets, Berkshire’s airline subsidiary. But he and Charlie Munger say they will generally continue to trust the subsidiary’s management.
Warren Buffett: The biggest mistake we made at NetJets was essentially buying aircraft at fictitious prices in terms of the prices we could sell them for later. Additionally, purchasing shares of less than one unit takes a certain amount of time.
There are many explanations for that. But at the end of the day, we clearly weren’t properly prepared for what was happening. And we lost a lot of money. A significant portion of this was due to aircraft write-downs. It can be called aircraft inventory. I bought it for X and couldn’t sell it for X or 90 percent of X.
Some of the planes were new and shouldn’t have been on board, and many were returned by their owners.
We also ensure that operating costs do not match recurring revenue.
But, you know, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I have been involved in the textile industry for 20 years. I knew it was terrible business. Charlie said it was terrible business the first year and the second year.
And 20 years later, I woke up. It looked like Rip Van Winkle. I mean, it’s kind of depressing when I think about it. (laughs)
But the only thing we can guarantee is that we will make some mistakes. It was a big mistake for the NetJets. That’s $711 million…
Charlie Munger: If we were to buy 30 large companies and generally leave them to the people who run them successfully, they used to run well with very little interference from headquarters, and 95 percent of the time they were very successful. Also, if there is one episode in which the basic franchise was preserved but the profit opportunity was lost for a while, it is not a major failure record.
It also doesn’t mean we should stop being so easy on the wonderful people who join our company.
Warren Buffett: No, that hasn’t changed. Our management approach remains unchanged.
Overall, I think my managers have performed better than I could have dreamed of when I first started this company.
In other words, we let our managers do their jobs.
berkshire stock watch
BRK.A stock price: $733,609.77
BRK.B stock price: $489.46
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 14.57
Berkshire Market Capitalization: $1,055,405,905,430
Berkshire Cash as of March 31st: $397.4 billion (up 6.5% from December 31st)
Excluding railroad cash and outstanding Treasury bills: $380.2 billion (3.0% increase from Dec. 31)
Berkshire repurchased $234 million of its own stock in the first quarter of 2026.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise noted)
Berkshire’s Top Stock Holdings – June 19, 2026
Berkshire’s top U.S. and Japanese listed stocks by market capitalization, based on the latest closing prices.
The US stock market is closed today, Friday, in observance of Independence Day, June 10th.
Asset holdings are as of March 31, 2026, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13th Floor filing dated May 15, 2026. However, the following cases are excluded.
Alphabet includes $10 billion in stock that Berkshire has agreed to buy directly from the company, as announced on June 1, 2026. Berkshire has not yet officially disclosed whether the deal has been completed. Entries are a combination of Class A and Class C Alphabet shares. The market price is the weighted average of the prices of the two classes. Mitsubishi data is as of April 30, 2026.
A complete list of holdings and current market value is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
Question or comment
If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter, please send them to alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, we do not forward questions or comments to Mr. Buffett himself.)
If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter yet, you can sign up here.
I also highly recommend Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. It’s collected here on Berkshire’s website.
— Alex Crippen, Warren Buffett Watch Editor
