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.

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.

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 1986 market crash .

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%.

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.

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? 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 comp