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Even more concerning is the belief that the ability to speak one's mind should be dependent on some arbitrary metric of "success".

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The OP never said that only successful people should be allowed to express themselves. It was the person above him who was making the inverse suggestion that at a certain success level you should be tempering yourself in public discourse.

There's a very big difference between negative positions and positive "why shouldn't they be able to" defences...

That's fair, but still by virtue of being successful (in this particular context of success) you have a lot more money which offers you a lot more freedom to express yourself. Musk is practically free to do most anything he wants to do, but he chooses to stay in a position where he exposes himself to risk by not tempering himself.

The only reason this matters in legal terms is because he's chairman of a public company with legal obligations. Whether that applies in a general cultural sense is a different question.

The risks Musk is willing to take and his private investors and coworkers tolerance for that is their own voluntary choices to make.

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