It goes beyond Elon. PE was (are?) pressuring Google to lay off more employees because their pay was so high. And the Fed said that worker pay was "too high," in the context of inflation.
Basically, the ownership class was pissy that some people were able to actually get away from exchanging time for money.
Yep, precisely! But all that was happening on a slow burn. Elon's deliberately public actions at Twitter were a (very intentional, I suspect) match to the powderkeg.