(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can subscribe here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)
First fatal NetJets crash kills influential Texas VC founderNetJets says it won’t speculate on what caused one of his planes to crash on a highway in Laredo, Texas Tuesday night, killing a prominent tech entrepreneur.
Joshua Baer was the founder of 50 years Capital factoryan Austin venture capital firm specializing in technology startups.
NetJets said in a statement: “Safety is and always has been the foundation of everything we do. » He will “cooperate fully” with investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board.
This is the first fatal accident for the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary and the first for a company providing fractional ownership of private jetsan economic model NetJets was born in 1986 before it was acquired by Berkshire in 1998.
The Cessna Citation Latitude plane was traveling from San Jose del Cabo, a resort town in Mexico, to Austin when its pilots reported it was low on fuel and requested an emergency landing at the Laredo airport.
Firefighters at the site of a NetJets plane crash in Laredo, Texas, June 16, 2026.
Laredo Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
News reports and videos from the scene show bystanders helping to rescue the two pilots and three teenage 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 escalate into a mass fatality event.”
A witness described the scene CNN as her husband joined the rescue efforts.
Former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti told the P.A. the final minutes of the flight suggest it was trying to head toward the Laredo airport after both engines lost power. “I think they just lacked altitude and speed towards the end.”
Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the US Department of Transportation, speculates on the P.A. there may have been a fuel leak since the jet’s 3,000-mile range is about three times the distance of its intended flight.
THE NTSB says the cockpit voice recorder and the plane’s flight data recorder are sent to Washington for analysis.
Google parent company overtakes Coca-Cola for third place in Berkshire’s stock portfolioBerkshire Hathaway hasn’t yet told us whether it actually bought the $10 billion in Alphabet shares it agreed to buy directly from Google’s parent company in a buyout deal. agreement announced on June 1.
But if these new shares are combined with its holdings in GOOGLE And GOOG as of March 31, as reported by Berkshire in its T1 13F filing with the SEC last month, their total market value is now slightly higher than Berkshire’s long-standing stake in Coca-Cola that Warren Buffett bought out after the 1987 stock market crash.
Here is the calculation:
Alphabet’s press release states that Berkshire has agreed to purchase $5 billion of its Class A (GOOGL) shares for $351.81 each and $5 billion of its Class C (GOOG) shares for $348.20 each.
This equates to more than 14 million shares of each class:
Adding the new shares to existing holdings gives Berkshire 68.5 million Class A shares and 17.9 million Class C shares:
Based on Thursday’s closing prices, Class A shares are valued at just under $25.2 billion and Class C shares are worth nearly $6.6 billion for a total of $31.79 billion:
This puts Alphabet in third place in Berkshire’s stock portfolio by a razor-thin margin of $34 million, ahead of Coke:
As of Friday, Coca-Cola was ahead by nearly $2 billion, but its shares have fallen nearly 4% this week while Alphabet has gained nearly 2%.
Stay tuned!
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 excerpt from his “New heights” podcast that was posted on Instagram this week, Travis Kelcean extremely well-known Kansas City Chiefs football player who plans to get married pop star Taylor Swiftmaybe next monthrecounted what he called an embarrassing encounter with a man he thought was Warren Buffett:
I have face blindness. Do you know I’m blind in the face?
Yeah, well, it’s a face blindness episode.
I’m going to New York, and there’s a huge festival, a music festival, in the Hamptons, and I’m a big music lover, as you know. (Applause)
And I’m going with a group of guys from New York in money, so it’s like a connection and like, finance and I think I’m going to be with a group of guys in finance at this music festival.
So I go up there and immediately start getting drinks, which is a good thing, the Kelce way of doing it.
And I’m dealing with shit. (Laugh)
Face the shit. I don’t even really know who is participating, who is performing at the concert. I’m right up there, like, hey, do you have any more tequila? (Laugh)
And a guy comes up and says, “Dude. Buffett is here. He wants to meet you.”
I’m like, “Holy shit. That’s a lot of money.” (Laugh)
“God, I’m way too tired to say hello to this guy and start talking finances.”
I have to go – pull myself together – get some water, where is the water, where is the water?
Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (87) passes the ball for a touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during the first quarter at Raymond James Stadium on October 2, 2022.
Kim Klement | USA Today Sports | Reuters
So, I’m getting some water, I’m going 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 grinning from ear to ear.
I think I’m going to be rich here soon. It goes (unintelligible) these investments.
And he started telling this story in high school when he first started playing guitar. (Laugh)
And I told him, straight to his face, “No way! Warren Buffett played guitar?” (Laughter and applause)
And his face went from smiling from ear to ear to not smiling at all.
And then we tapped him 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 confusing Jimmy Buffett – the late, great, amazing Jimmy Buffett with – I thought Warren Buffett was going to be at a music festival in the Hamptons. (Laugh)
This is probably the most embarrassing story I have to tell you.
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” with rewritten lyrics to “Wasting away in Berkshire Hathaway-a-ville / Searchin’ for some good company to buy”.
He is dead of a rare form of skin cancer in 2023 at the age of 76.
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNETHIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVESHow NetJets Cost Berkshire Hundreds of Millions of Dollars (2010)Warren Buffett points out mistakes carried out at NetJets, the aeronautical subsidiary of Berkshire. But he and Charlie Munger say they will generally continue to trust their subsidiary leaders.
WARREN BUFFETT: The biggest mistake we made with NetJets was basically what we kept: We were buying planes at fictitious prices, in terms of what price we could then sell them for. And buying fractional shares takes a certain amount of time.
There are many explanations for this. But ultimately, we didn’t prepare well for what was obviously happening. And we lost a lot of money, a lot of which was due to the depreciation of the planes, which you could call our inventory, where we were buying them at X and we couldn’t sell them at X or 90% of X.
Some of them were new planes that we shouldn’t have taken on, and many of them were planes returning from their owners.
We also let our operating costs diverge from recurring revenue.
But you know, I made a lot of mistakes. I stayed in the textile industry for 20 years. I knew it was a bad deal. Charlie was telling me it was a bad deal 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. (Laugh)
But the only thing we guarantee is that we will make mistakes. It was a big mistake at NetJets, $711 million is the number…
CHARLIE MUNGER: If we buy 30 large companies and generally let the people who run them successfully run them with very little interference from headquarters, and it works great 95 percent of the time, and we have an episode where the core franchise was protected but we lost profit opportunities for a while, that’s not a great record of failure.
Nor does it indicate that we should stop being quite easy on the remarkable people who join us with their businesses.
WARREN BUFFETT: No, that’s not going to change – it doesn’t change our management approach at all.
I think we have achieved, overall, performance from managers that exceeds the dreams I would have had when I first started this company.
So, it’s been a… we let the managers do their job.
BERKSHIRE STOCKS WATCHFour weeks
Twelve months
BRK.A stock price: $733,609.77
BRK.B stock price: $489.46
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 14.57
Market capitalization of Berkshire: $1,055,405,905,430
Berkshire Cash as of March 31: $397.4 billion (up 6.5% from December 31)
Excluding rail cash and subtracting Treasury bills payable: $380.2 billion (up 3.0% from December 31)
Berkshire repurchased $234 million worth of its shares in the first quarter of 2026.
(All figures as of publication date unless otherwise noted)
MAIN PARTICIPATIONS OF BERKSHIRE – June 19, 2026Top holdings of Berkshire publicly traded stocks in the United States and Japan, by market value, based on latest closing prices.
US stock markets are closed today, Friday, for Juneteenth, National Independence Day.
The holdings are as of March 31, 2026, as shown in Berkshire Hathaway Filing 13F on May 15, 2026, with the exception of:
Alphabet, which includes the $10 billion in stock Berkshire agreed to buy directly from the company, as well as announced June 1, 2026. Berkshire has not yet officially revealed whether the transaction has been completed. The input is a combination of Class A And Class C Alphabetical actions. The market price is a weighted average of the prices of the two classes.Mitsubishii.e. as of April 30, 2026The complete list of stocks and current market values is available at CNBC.com. Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTSPlease send me any questions or comments regarding the newsletter at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
If you are not already subscribed to this newsletter, you can subscribe here.
Additionally, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. He collected there here on the Berkshire website.
— Alex Crippen, editor-in-chief, Warren Buffett Watch
