You might be surprised how little people actually regard the owner's political opinion of the miltibillion dollar corporation from which they just bought a quarter-million dollar car.
I wouldn't even be surprised if a significant percentage of Tesla owners don't even know who owns the company.
I read that title and was quite confused, thinking "they do have a free plan..."
Anyway, I understand your concern with this huge monopoly. As far as I know, there really are no competitors. And while I can imagine being worried about the company's future trajectory, I like the way they do stuff now. They are very open about stuff, and they have an interesting blog.
That 20% figure makes some sense to me because a lot of small websites use it because it is affordable (the low, low price of free), and is so valuable to being able to actually get down to the content creation.
Seems from this article to have been a pretty standard operation, despite the unusually large scale.
The biggest thing I picked up on was their practice that they mentioned of sampling traffic and analyzing it asynchronously, to avoid latency penalties.
Searching for meaning for these things is a trap. It can be a harmless hobby, but for many people it becomes something more and can tear them apart (e.g. inducing anxiety or obsession with it).
Many (but not necessarily all) people who sell this type of paraphernalia or services are con artists looking to make a buck off of desperate people who are looking to make sense of their lives in places where they won't.
I imagine this story was worth orders of magnitude more to the news network than the ticket would be worth to the man... I'm sure they could make it worth his while :)
I agree that it seems a little bit over-dramatic, but seeing as an employee said it was a "shit show" (quoting from the article), there must be something going on over there. I can imagine that once the realization set in that Musk wouldn't be joining the board and would in fact just be continuing to criticize Twitter on the platform itself, this caused consternation and people began to wonder where he was planning to go with this.
