That's... less than I expected? Certainly more expensive that a normal person could afford, but with the levels of income disparity in the US, that's frighteningly affordable for a large corporation and within reach for highly motivated rich individual. If you own a cloud (aka Amazon wants to break into your VPN), they get major discounts on time on their fleet. If, instead, it costs $0.01/hr due to using unused capacity during quiet times of day, that's works out to be like $1000 to crack it.
As to what makes it worth it. $50k is too expensive to attack all users of this particular VPN software, but there's way more than $50k worth of information companies want to keep secret (call it competitive intelligence) being protected by VPN software the world over.
As to what makes it worth it. $50k is too expensive to attack all users of this particular VPN software, but there's way more than $50k worth of information companies want to keep secret (call it competitive intelligence) being protected by VPN software the world over.