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A Mistake in a Tesla and a Panicked Final Call: The Death of Angela Chao.
What happened on a remote Texas ranch in a billionaire shipping scion’s final hours:
Mar 8, 2024, The Wall Street Journal.
Angela Chao had much to celebrate on the Chinese New Year, dawn of the year of the dragon, a symbol of prosperity so auspicious that mothers timed pregnancies to its arrival.
She was chief executive of her family’s growing global shipping operation and had steered the business through years of disruption. She had a 3-year-old son James, the namesake of her husband Jim Breyer, a billionaire venture capitalist. Chao and Breyer had made some big life changes during the pandemic, moving their primary residences from Manhattan and the Bay Area to the sunny boomtown of Austin, Texas, buying an Italianate mansion downtown and a sprawling ranch just under an hour west.
Chao, 50, had invited seven girlfriends from her days at Harvard Business School to spend the holiday weekend of Feb. 9 at the ranch. It was a gorgeous retreat, with a dozen horse stables, a swimming pool, a putting green, a basketball court and a 10-bedroom guesthouse known as “the inn.” A stone patio offered breathtaking views of the Hill Country, especially at sunset as the light glinted off the small ponds dotting the property.
Chao’s friends flew in Friday evening and spent the next day roaming the ranch’s 900 acres, as Chao showed off the topography, including a mile-long stretch of Miller Creek, crossed by two dams, and the wildlife, including Rio Grande turkeys and exotic Axis and Stika deer, so different from New York City where her friends lived. They had barbecue delivered for dinner and spent the evening catching up. Around 11:30 p.m., Chao left the inn to head back to the main house. Her son was asleep, under the watch of the nanny, and she wanted to be home when he woke up the next morning.
The night was chilly and very dark, with no moon, so rather than walk, Chao got in her Tesla Model X SUV for the four-minute trip back to the house.
