This definitely feels fake. Either just a fabulist or someone mad at VMware and wants to scare them. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies do not know about the Linux virtualization market.
There’s not enough hours in the day where these CEOs would be so far down in the weeds of the business that they’re making VM flavor decisions.
Obviously a fortune 500 CEO does not know jack about IT. But someone has raised the alarm on the price hike and presented a few possible solutions, that have reached all the way to the board.
Given the high risk, tight schedule, and the amount of work something like this must be driven by the CEO (or at least directly sponsored by him) or it will not happen.
He also knows about Linux and license free virtualization. But making a move requires people, and people with Linux knowledge are very rare.
CEOs hearing about some stuff and immediately jumping on it and ordering someone to look into it is quite common.
They might tell someone below them "we need Linux VMs, stat!" the same way they might say "We need to move everything onto the blockchain!", all depending on what they pick up at a conference or the golf course.