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
ILLUSTRATION: EMIL LENDOF/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL/EAGLEVIEW, GETTY IMAGES
March 8, 2024 9:00 pm ET
Angela 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 Sitka 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.
The account of what happened to Angela Chao that weekend is based on interviews with people close to Chao and her family, county officials who were briefed on what happened or were there, as well as reviews of law-enforcement documents.
Within minutes of saying her goodbyes, she called one of her friends in a panic. While making a three-point turn, she had put the car in reverse instead of drive, she said. It is a mistake she had made before with the Tesla gearshift. The car had zipped backward, tipping over an embankment and into a pond. It was sinking fast. Could they help her?
Over the next several hours, her friends, then the ranch manager and his wife, and then paramedics, and firefighters and sheriff’s deputies rushed around and tried to break the windows, find an escape hatch or any way to get Chao out of the car. Somehow an executive who made her living on the sea was drowning in a stock pond within sight of her home.
The Chao family’s closely held New York-based business is valued at $1.3 billion. Angela Chao had twice married billionaires. In 2009, she became the fourth wife of Bruce Wasserstein, the head of Lazard, whose role advising in the 1988 takeover battle of RJR Nabisco kicked off a new era in corporate mergers and acquisitions. When Wasserstein died of a heart attack nine months after their marriage, Chao retained his apartment at 927 Fifth Avenue, one of the most exclusive co-ops on the Upper East Side, due east of Central Park’s model-boat pond.
When her car went underwater, all the power and status in the world were irrelevant. The local officials trying to save her didn’t know who she was. All they knew was that it was dark and the water was black and cold. They couldn’t even be sure that the submerged structure they were standing on was her metallic dark blue Model X.
Halfway around the world, it was midmorning on Sunday. Jim Breyer was in Dubai on the way to a conference center for the United Arab Emirates World Government Summit, where he would be speaking on a panel about artificial intelligence and medicine, his latest professional passion. He was in a car with a colleague when the phone rang. It was one of his wife’s girlfriends. There had been a tragic accident, she said.
In the background, Breyer could hear the buzz of activity. His wife’s friend said there were deputies, paramedics and firefighters trying to revive Chao, but her car had been underwater for a long time. Breyer heard someone ask to speak with him, the voice on the other end of his wife’s friend’s phone.
The man identified himself as being with EMS. He asked who he was speaking to.
“What’s the relationship to the deceased?” the man asked.
“It’s Jim Breyer,” he said. “I’m her husband.”
Though she was one of the world’s most powerful women, Angela Chao was little-known outside the world of shipping. She was the youngest of six sisters, four of whom, herself included, attended Harvard Business School. Chao majored in economics at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in just three years. The school’s Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center for executive education is named after her late mother, who, along with Angela’s 96-year-old father James S.C. Chao, co-founded the Foremost Group shipping company, which carries more than 20 million tons of dry goods a year for companies like Bunge and Cargill.
Chao’s older sister Elaine was U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Bush administration and U.S. Secretary of Transportation in the Trump administration. Elaine Chao is married to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).
One emergency unit for Blanco County, where Johnson City is located, got there at 12:28 a.m., about 24 minutes after getting a call, according to a fire department incident report. The terrain and accessibility were such that some first responders decided to get out of their vehicles and walk to the exact location. One responder described the Tesla as completely submerged, with some deputies standing on it as they tried to get in to rescue Chao.
The responders set up lighting. Rescue workers needed a dive team, but none was available, according to the incident report. More emergency workers arrived on the scene as the deputies on top of the car requested tools to break the window. An emergency services worker and firefighter entered the water with rescue tools.
A tow truck came but didn’t have a cable long enough to reach the vehicle. Some on the scene didn’t expect the vehicle to be so far out in the pond, but responders eventually retrieved a longer cable. At least one tow driver, not used to towing an electric vehicle out of water, was afraid of being electrocuted, said a person who was at the scene.
It turns out that when submerged in water, an electric vehicle is designed to not pose a shock risk because the high-voltage battery is isolated from the frame of the car, according to the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit organization that develops fire-safety codes and standards.
After the car was towed from the water, the doors of the vehicle were opened and hundreds of gallons of water rushed out. Chao was unresponsive, according to Ben Oakley, emergency services chief of Blanco County. She was pulled from the vehicle and attempts were made to resuscitate her, but to no avail.
