A functioning commercial regulatory apparatus would not allow vendors to call the practice of providing encumbered software licenses in exchange for money by the term "selling software". That we put to with this practice, which basically lives on consumer confusion, is a bug.

It's a lot like our allowing people to sell patent medicines as "supplements". In both cases, we let people distort the meaning of regular words for commercial gain.

He said the payment was more like a rent than gaining full ownership, as in a car.

When you buy a car, the title is signed over to you, and you become its owner. Microsoft Office is information that Microsoft agrees to share with you subject to certain restrictions on your use of it. To actually purchase Microsoft Office the intellectual property, as opposed to a license for it, would cost you about 9 orders of magnitude more.

They're also restricting their customers' actions in meatspace (you can't drive people around in exchange for money) while the Office restrictions (you can't create business-related files) are IP-related.

A more accurate analogy would be if Microsoft banned you from using a Surface for business purposes (or for business purposes while running Windows, but it's impossible to install a different OS).

IANAL so I don't know if Tesla is on solid legal ground (I would guess that probably they are), but I think there's certainly a clear philosophical distinction.