This is the power Elon Musk has: O’Leary loves ‘very contentious’ plan to cut spending (youtube.com)
Might be a point here. Musk has never really obeyed social pressure. He probably felt it's pain early but one way to deal with it, when you want to do something important but social pressure is against it, is to kind of lean into it. Now, he's a guy who is totally fine undertaking things that he believes in that have a huge amount of pressure against them, not something you can say of most people in government (or most large corporations, which are kind of like government).