That kind of company is always laying off 3% of the workforce.

I decided that I never wanted to work at Intel in the early 00's when it became clear that they had a periodic ritual of laying off 10% of their engineers. I left academica because I didn't think I was good at musical chairs and no way would I want to work somewhere where I might get laid off just because they want to lay off 10% of the workers.

Yes. If Google is an illegal monopoly, Microsoft is too. I can only guess that since Microsoft rarely makes it into the "Big Tech" naughty list, they're doing an appropriate dollar amount of lobbying, where other companies didn't.

Does Microsoft hold much cryptocurrency?

.NET is an open-source product. How would you sell it?