Where did the savings come from? Maybe they were licensing a paid font? I doubt saved them more money than using a free font.
In the documentary video, their CCO explained if they used a different existing font they would have had to rework a lot of their media for the different font metrics, while making their own allowed them to have a drop-in replacement.
They were licensing Whitney SSm, they switched to a Source Sans derived typeface to save those costs but forked and adjusted it to more closely match Whitney SSm to minimize brand disruption.