There is a 100% chance that someone in Broadcom exec team is making money shorting themselves.

Or else some insider assurance that they'd get so much money from government or some big customer that they could run their products into the ground no matter what. But enterprises are not as locked in as people think.

Broadcom has absolutely zero interest in the long-term future of VMware. Their only goal is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible before it goes bust.

Let's say that VMware had a $10B revenue with a $9B operating cost. If 0.1% of their megacorp customers is responsible for 20% of that revenue while only being 1% of the support needs, then ditching the other 99.9% of customers reduces revenue to $2B while the operating cost can be reduced to $90M - increasing profit from $1B to $1.91B.

Those huge customers are quite locked in, so you can squeeze them for a couple of years before they leave. They have their own in-house support teams, so you can cut all L1/L2 support people. You're killing the product, so you can cut all developers except a handful to patch CVEs. The smaller customers who are leaving are doing some after a massive price hike, so you get a nice one-time renewal bonus while they desperately try to move to alternatives.

No need to do any shorting when you're generating massive profits for a couple of years. The plan when VMware is dead? Cut up its corpse in tiny parts, sell them off, buy another company, repeat the same strategy. As long as the total money they manage to extract from VMware is more than its acquisition cost, Broadcom has succeeded.

I didn't realize how addicted some orgs were to VMWare until Broadcom bought them and I witnessed zero people migrate to alternatives. It's been one of the single biggest shocks to me in my career. Watching them get squeezed openly and ruthlessly and just accepting it. I've only ever seen Microsoft pull that off before.