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If we demand that publicly funded universities adopt open access Elsevier will be gone in a few years.

Elsevier will happily publish your papers as open access (for a small service fee).

Unfortunately, funders don't want to restrict where researchers can publish the work (in order to prevent themselves from being able to silence results they might not like, i.e. hinder "academic freedom"). This means that this demand is implemented by simply paying hugely disproportionate publishing fees ("article processing charges") to the same old journals to make the individual articles they funded available as open access.

How will Elsevier be gone if it controls so much of the content used in citations?

Over time I believe more content will be published in open access journals. In Machine Learning this is already quite common and it's amazing.