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Influential Texas venture capital founder killed in first fatal NetJets crash
NetJets says it will not speculate to what caused one of his planes hit a highway in Laredo, Texas late Tuesday, killing the prominent tech entrepreneur.
Joshua Burr was the 50-year-old founder of Capital factoryan Austin-based venture capital firm specializing in technology startups.
In their statement, NetJets does say, “Safety is and always has been at the heart of everything we do.” He will “cooperate fully” with National Transportation Safety Board investigators.
This is the first fatal accident for a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway and the first for any company that provides equity ownership of private jetsbusiness model NetJets was founded in 1986 before it was acquired by Berkshire in 1998.
The Cessna Citation Latitude was flying from San Jose del Cabo, a resort town in Mexico, to Austin when the pilots reported they were running low on fuel and requested an emergency landing at the Laredo airport.
Firefighters at the scene of a NetJets plane crash in Laredo, Texas, on June 16, 2026.
Laredo Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
Reports and video from the scene show bystanders helping to rescue the two pilots and three teenage passengers who survived.
The mayor of Laredo told reporters: “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.”
The witness described the scene CNN as her husband joined the rescue effort.
Former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti reports AP The last minutes of the flight show that he was trying to fly to Laredo Airport after both engines lost power. “I think they just ran out of altitude and airspeed by the end.”
Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the US Department of Transportation, suggests AP there could have been a fuel leak, since the plane’s 3,000-mile range is about three times the intended flight distance.
The NTSB says the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are sent to Washington for analysis.
Google’s parent company has overtaken Coca-Cola as the third-largest stock in Berkshire’s stock portfolio
Berkshire Hathaway has not yet told us if it actually acquired the $10 billion worth of Alphabet stock it agreed to buy directly from Google’s parent company. the deal was announced on June 1.
But if these new shares are combined with his holding GOOGLE and GOOG as of March 31, Berkshire reported in its Supply Q1 13F with the SEC last month, their total market value is now slightly larger than Berkshire’s long-standing stake Coca-Cola what Warren Buffett bought after the market crash in 1987.
Here’s the math:
An Alphabet press release said Berkshire agreed to buy $5 billion of its Class A shares ( GOOGL ) at $351.81 each and $5 billion of its Class C shares ( GOOG ) at $348.20 each.
This amounts to more than 14 million shares of each class:
Adding the new shares to its existing holdings gives Berkshire 68.5 million Class A shares and 17.9 million Class C shares:
Based on Thursday’s closing prices, the Class A shares are valued at just under $25.2 billion and the Class C shares at nearly $6.6 billion, for a total of $31.79 billion:
This puts Alphabet in third place in Berkshire’s stock portfolio by a margin of $34 million, ahead of Coca-Cola:
Coca-Cola topped nearly $2 billion last Friday, but its shares are down nearly 4% this week, while Alphabet is up nearly 2%.
The famous football player told an embarrassing conversation with “Buffet”
Jimmy Buffett with Warren Buffett at a meeting in Berkshire in 2016.
Lacey O’Toole | CNBC
In what appears to be a way out of his “New heights“the podcast that was posted on Instagram this week Travis Kelcea very famous Kansas City Chiefs football player who plans to get married pop star Taylor Swiftit is possible next monthrecounted what he called an embarrassing encounter with a man he believed to be Warren Buffett:
My face is blind. Do you know that I am blind?
Yes, it’s a face blindness episode.
I’m going to New York, and there’s a big festival in the Hamptons, a music festival, and I’m a big music fan, as you know. (applause)
And I’m with a bunch of guys from New York in the money world, so it’s kind of a connection and finance, and I think I’m going to be around a bunch of guys in finance at this music festival.
So I get up there and immediately start getting drinks, which is pretty cool, the Kelce way of doing things.
And I get shit in the face. (Laughter)
Get shit in the face. I don’t even know who is performing at the concert. I’m just upstairs like hey do you have any more tequila? (Laughter)
And the guy comes up and says, “Dude. Buffett’s here. He wants to meet you.”
I’m like, “Damn, that’s a lot of money.” (Laughter)
“Oh my god, I’m too upset to say hi to this guy and start a conversation about finances.”
I need to go – collect – collect water, where is the water, where is the water?
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (87) runs for a touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the first quarter at Raymond James Stadium, Oct. 2, 2022.
Kim Clement | USA Today Sports | Reuters
So, I’m getting water, I’m going to meet Buffett. I shake his hand and we have the best conversation I’ve ever had in my life. The man smiles literally from ear to ear.
I think I will soon get rich here. He is going to (unintelligible) these investments.
And he started telling this story in high school, when he first picked up a guitar. (Laughter)
And I said 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 was 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 it was because I mistook Jimmy Buffett—the late, great, incredible Jimmy Buffett—for thinking Warren Buffett was going to be at the Hamptons Music Festival. (Laughter)
This is probably the most embarrassing story I have for you.
The two Buffetts are not related, but they were friends, calling themselves “Cousin Warren” and “Cousin Jimmy.”
Jimmy Buffett regularly attended Berkshire’s annual meeting, even opening the meeting of 2007 with execution”Margaritaville” with rewritten lyrics about “I’m wasting away in Berkshire Hathaway-a-ville / Searchin’ for some good companies to buy.”
He died with a a rare form of skin cancer in 2023 at the age of 76.
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE ONLINE
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CNBC BUFFET ARCHIVES
How NetJets Cost Berkshire Hundreds of Millions of Dollars (2010)
Warren Buffett shows mistakes made at NetJets, Berkshire’s aviation subsidiary. But he and Charlie Munger say they will generally continue to trust the executives of their subsidiaries.
Warren Buffett: The biggest mistake we made with NetJets is that we essentially kept — we bought the planes at dummy prices, in terms of the price at which we could later sell them. And there is a certain amount of time involved in buying fractional shares.
There are many explanations for this. But as a result, we didn’t prepare properly for what was clearly happening. And we lost a lot of money, a lot of which was related to the write-down of airplanes that you might call our inventory, where we bought them at X price and couldn’t sell them at X price or 90 percent of X price.
Some of them were new aircraft that we weren’t supposed to take into service, and many of them were aircraft coming back from owners.
We also allow our operating expenses to fall short of current revenues.
But, you know, I made a lot of mistakes. I worked in the textile business for 20 years. I knew it was a bad thing. Charlie told me that the first year, the second year is bad business.
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 one thing we guarantee, we will make some mistakes. It was a big mistake at NetJets, the $711 million figure…
CHARLIE MUNGER: If we buy 30 big businesses and generally let the people who run them successfully—have run them before with very little interference from headquarters and it works 95 percent of the time very well, and we have one episode where the core franchise was protected but we lost the ability to turn a profit for a while, that’s not a great record of failure.
It also doesn’t mean we have to stop being pretty easy on the wonderful people who join us with their campaigns.
Warren Buffett: No, it won’t change—it doesn’t change our approach to management at all.
I think overall we’ve gotten performance from the managers that I couldn’t have dreamed of when I was just putting this company together.
So it was — we let the managers do their thing.
BERKSHIRE STOCK EXCHANGE WATCH
BRK.A stock price: $733,609.77
BRK.B share price: $489.46
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 14.57
Berkshire’s market cap: $1,055,405,905,430
Berkshire Cash as of March 31: $397.4 billion (up 6.5% from December 31)
Excluding rail cash and T-bill debt: $380.2 billion (up 3.0% from December 31)
Berkshire bought back its shares for $234 million in the first quarter of 2026.
(All figures are as of date of publication unless otherwise noted)
BERKSHIRE JOINT STOCK HOLDINGS – 19 June 2026
Berkshire’s largest publicly traded U.S. and Japanese holdings by market value based on recent closing prices.
US stock markets are closed today, Friday National Independence Day, June 1.
Holdings as of March 31, 2026, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway 13F filing May 15, 2026, except for:
- Alphabet, which includes $10 billion worth of 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. A record is a combination Class A and Class C Action alphabet. The market value is the weighted average of the prices of the two classes.
- Mitsubishithat as of April 30, 2026
A complete list of holdings and current market values is available on CNBC.com Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send me any questions or comments about the newsletter at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we do not forward questions and comments to Buffett himself.)
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Additionally, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended. There is collected here on the Berkshire website.
— Alex Crippen, editor of Warren Buffett Watch