Outsourcing delivery
The obvious solution is to use external fulfillment services instead of delivering himself, in the vein of dropshipping. In this model, Santa would produce all his toys at the North Pole, and deliver them somewhere else, say by November 25 for them to ship the products around the world.
Let's go through his base expenses in this model:
* Elf wages stay the same: \$9 billion total for workers and support staff. Because he sends out toys a month early in this model, they only work 11/12 months, so a savings of about 1 billion.
* Santa can make cheaper toys this year, let's say he only spends \$7.5 billion on his 2 billion toys.
* Since the reindeer aren't flying, they don't need millions of bushels of oats. Allow them to graze in the tundra and take a year off. Cost: \$0.
* I assume <PERSON> is sovereign of his own land and doesn't owe rent or property taxes.
Now he has to get his toys from his base of operations (somewhere in the Arctic circle) to a distribution center, likely one in Europe or North America, as that's where most of the gift-giving Christmas celebrators are. Let's say he chooses Rotterdam and Los Angeles.
The standard shipping container is 1,280 cubic feet. Let's say Santa's small toys are about $1/8$ of a cubic foot. (A cubic foot is a big present!) The average container ship carries about 10,000 containers.
That means if he sends two ships, one to Rotterdam and one to LA, he can ship about 205 million gifts, so he needs 10 ships total to deliver 2 billion packages.
Now how much does it cost to ship two whole container ships?
According to this fellow, who says he works in maritime shipping, it costs \$3200 - \$4500 for a 40' container (twice what we've been basing our math on).
Let's go with the low end because of a massive bulk discount, so \$3,000 for a 40' container, \$1,500 for a 20' container. 130
Now, <PERSON> isn't shipping trans-Pacific, so reduce costs by 20% to account for this.
* Beijing to LA: 6,261 mi
* North Pole to LA: 3,875 mi
* North Pole to Rotterdam: 2,639 mi.
$$ 20,000 * (1,500 * 0.8) * 10 = 24 * 10^7 $$
A surprisingly cheap $240 million to get all his presents from the North Pole to LA and Rotterdam.
However, 2 billion is an enormous amount of packages to ship in a month. Amazon ships an estimate 608 million packages a year so shipping 2 billion in a month is $40\times$ Amazon's monthly deliveries.
Obviously, Amazon doesn't account for every delivery, but there's no way they're only 2.5% of deliveries.
Now you have to deliver them. He can do this through intermediaries instead of under <PERSON>, therefore saving him embarrassment.
USPS delivers 506.4 million packages a day. Santa needs to deliver about 66 million a day if they have a month to deliver them. Every day, the USPS goes through \$395.4 million, at a cost of \$0.78 per package. Round this to $1.5because of large and irregular gifts.
Santa needs to deliver 2 billion gifts. The average US family with kids has 1.86 kids. If he packages gifts for one household together, he might get as low as only delivering 1.08 billion gifts.
Therefore, delivery fees will cost about $1.62 billion worldwide.
I estimate, then, that it for someone to take over Santa's operation, but sill hiring his elves and delivering the toys they make, it will cost (in billions):
$$ 9 + 7.5 + .24 + 1.62 = 18.26 $$
So to summarize, for someone else to take over Santa's operation I estimate it would cost 20 billion US dollars (rounding up).
That's approximately the GDP of Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Cyprus, or about the net worth of <PERSON> (<PERSON>'s widow) or Microsoft co-founder <PERSON>, who are about the 40th richest people in the world. 207