I'm not convinced. Can you go to the Berkshire shareholder meeting and vote for your 0.0001 shares?
I find it much more likely that it's actually your broker who truly owns the share and you have a contract with them. This is not at all like a house which can actually have two true owners.
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with such an arrangement, of course.
> Cede technically owns substantially all of the publicly issued stock in the United States.[2] Thus, investors do not themselves hold direct property rights in stock, but rather have contractual rights that are part of a chain of contractual rights involving Cede.[3]
Modifying the last link in that chain isn't such a big deal.
> I still wonder what might happen if the broker went bust and owed X different people various fractions of a single Berkshire share.
Legal liabilities ultimately are generally settled in dollars, though if an entity “goes bust” they tend to be written off or resolved at a small fraction of their theoretical worth based on the liquidation value of the remaining assets.
If you "own" one share, or 100, there are a couple of layers of other people who "truly own" the share, and you have a contract with them. You can look up Cede & Co and the DTCC.
Your arrangement with your broker for fractional shares is similar, though not identical. They're not just selling you a derivative product that they may optionally hedge with BRK/A.
> I find it much more likely that it's actually your broker who truly owns the share and you have a contract with them. This is not at all like a house which can actually have two true owners.
Well, a share of stock can have two true owners, it's just that public stocks don't.
The legal ownership structure isn't hard to find out; it is actually mandated by law. All publicly traded stocks are owned by the company set up for that purpose. Doesn't matter whether you're the contractual owner of a tenth of a share or the "sole owner" of a full share; the share is owned by DTCC.
>Can you go to the Berkshire shareholder meeting and vote for your 0.0001 shares
You could form a contract with your co-share owners describing how you allocate that benefit, just like would be necessary with a house with co-owners.
I have no idea if that happens, but it's certainly just as possible.
I find it much more likely that it's actually your broker who truly owns the share and you have a contract with them. This is not at all like a house which can actually have two true owners.
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with such an arrangement, of course.