Well, this isn’t really that big of a problem. Just let the price overflow. That should make it easier for them to just split the stock next time they get there ;)
With all the weird structures of stock lending and synthetics going around, I believe it's been extremely valuable for Buffet to keep it as it is for all these years.
There are no exchange traded options on BRK.A, lending shares to be shorted gives you interest on the total $ value, not the number of shares. Neither of these are the reason for not splitting.
Creating a second class of share is a very very bad solution: It splits exchange liquidity. It also complicates all the investor relations correspondence, adding lawyer fees.
A huge fraction of publicly traded companies have preferred stock in addition to their standard ticker... They just have different terms (eg pricing vs underlying, dividends, etc).
Because the owner of the other class of share believes themselves to own part of the company, but they don't. It's confusing. What you really own is some sort of bond from the company that guarantees they will pay you an amount equivalent to a dividend or something, not a share of the company.
> Because the owner of the other class of share believes themselves to own part of the company, but they don't.
Shares, whether in one class or many, are packages of claims against the company, not really ownership of the company in the simple sense. That’s fairly fundamental to the corporate form as distinct from, say, partnerships.
It’s not like they haven’t seen this coming for literal years.
Maybe they were assuming he’d give in?