In fact the EU recently passed laws to nip budding "market dominant companies" before they take out all of the competition and bundle lots of unrelated services.
The political climate soured with regards to Big Tech and that's happening across party lines.
In either case this story will definitely increase popcorn consumption.
Now that the deals i done he needs to make the best of it (for his ego but also for Tesla control reasons).
What will come of it remains to be seen. It could still end in a number of ways
I'm still figuring out how the "no due diligence, no exit hatch - final offer" figures into this. Why no not do it like you usually approach a takeover of this scale.
He did try to wiggle out of it almost instantly and found himself locked into the contract by "himself".
To me this feels like he made a fairly emotional decision, used his influential network and personal assets to setup the deal but was afraid to "chicken out"/face reality when given the chance.
Many APIs do have price tiers but it depends upon the business model, if the API is the product, or the app is the product and the API drives traffic and use cases. For a super-app, arguably the app is the product & profit generator and an open, free API would support usage of that.