You would probably save on overhead. I know they are always saying they have some absurdly low number of employees at hq, but there are tons of corporate employees not at hq who do things like generate consolidated financials and tax returns.
Maybe the savings don't outweigh the benefits of 1 tax return and less public company costs though not sure.
I think eventually it will get broken up, because it will become too unwieldy to manage.
You're making an assumption about the "tons of corporate employees" producing accounting reports. The quarterly reports are prepared at headquarters - I heard that directly from someone in accounting at HQ. Berkshire doesn't produce monthly consolidated financials.
The subsidiary financials would remain and still have to be prepared. You'd have 1 & 1, but they'd still add up to 2. No change in costs. Same with the tax return: two smaller piles adding up to the same size as before.
It seems improbable to me that the 20 some odd people at HQ can consolidate that many different subsidiary financials on a quarterly basis, and file the consolidated tax return. Plus I'm pretty sure I've seen job ads for a corporate office elsewhere in Omaha. Not "HQ" obviously, but people doing corporate functions. Maybe I'm wrong, and I don't think its that important anyway.
This won't get broken up or kept together for G&A savings. It will get broken up when the discount to the sum-of-the-parts value gets too large for shareholders to justify keeping it together. Almost certainly after WEB has passed away. At some point the market won't like management, and will wonder why it makes sense to keep these disparate businesses together.
Because WEB's shares are getting converted to B shares and sold that will leave Munger's estate beneficiaries with a great deal of voting power, so they will control the timeline here to a certain degree. But I think there will be significant spin-offs/break-up of BRK within the next say 30-40 years.
