NetJets’ first fatal crash kills influential Texas VC founder

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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.

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…