It's incredibly frustrating to try and figure out how this grift works. The company is bleeeing money at high pressure. The more users they get, the faster they lose money. Even if you're a true believer who thinks their product is useful and will be ubiquitous in the near future, there's no way this makes sense as an investment.
It could be a greater fool scam, but if you're goddamn Softbank, Microsoft, or NVIDIA investing hundreds of millions, surely you are the biggest fool already? Who's MSFT gonna flip their share to? Scrooge McDuck? A G7 member government? God?
Or maybe they're expecting to become so ubiquitous you can't live without ChatGPT, at which point they will jack up the price (the good old MS EEE/Oracle Hustle). I suppose that would parse, but the novelty is already fading and public sentiment is at a downward slope. Even if you're a true believer, you'd have to beat the competition first. You could also hope for a magician to come along and suddenly invent chips that are an order of magnitude more efficient, but you'd still need to pay another king's ransom to have them designed, manufactured and sold to you (and absolutely not to your competitors).
How do they get away with these bonkers numbers? They're somehow going to make 20 times more revenue in the remaining year than they have until now? They're going to nearly double their earnings every year? They're gonna fucking invest seven trillion in TSMC chip fabs? These numbers are made up by a nine-year old. My burger restaurant where we use natural diamonds as grill charcoal is gonna be worth inifite plus one zillion brazillion skibidillion dollars next year. Please invest in it.
Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium's case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).
You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let's not kid ourselves. They wouldn't need to openwash if most of their stuff weren't still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.