What happened on a remote Texas ranch in a billionaire shipping scion’s final hours.
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.