Although I share your evaluation that he is likely in it for petty reasons.
No. Depends on the purpose.
For example, would it "hurt" to be useful to the supposed incoming AGI overlords by preparing humans with digital read/write implants in their brains?
Find a couch and lay down before the vapors get too strong.
But even a commitment to a strong concept of IP isn't an obstacle when new fuckery can be done. In the new wave generative AI, Microsoft continues to innovate. Even without including anything done by open OpenAI, they probably win most shady data scam to train AI from their acquisition of Github and subsequent indiscriminate use of private repos to train models that will then regurgitate snippets of code (again, this coming from a company that is very litigious about its own code's IP rights), as well as using lots of code open-sourced under licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial usage or require code built from it to be open-sourced in turn to train models that are both themselves directly sold as a commercial product without making its source (let alone weights or datasets) available, but that also will regurgitate code from those repos without replicating those licenses, thus essentially laundering any arbitrary violation of those licenses (After all, copilot might have suggested that snippet of code with the developer using it never knowing that it was from a GPL-licensed codebase). So to summarize, after building an entire business on code as IP and spending a ton on everything from press to litigation to lobbying strengthening the inviolability of this IP, they then created the world's most effective tool for ignoring IP law for proprietary corporate code and open-source code alike in order to effectively sell this capability as a service
I fully stand by calling Microsoft one of the most dangerous and irresponsible companies currently active on this planet. Perhaps you've got a better argument against this claim than an oblique comparison to sexist depictions of housewives in old movies. Feel free to share it if you like
Sorry my dumbass fell asleep by the end of that rant. Also, I fucking hate "smart people" so i take that as a deeply personal insult.