Did the firing come before or after actual loss of customers who read his idea of a joke and freely decided (on a "yeah, fuck that guy" basis) that they weren't going to give him their money any more?
I ask that question because public relations is, in fact, part of a CEO's job - and if he was "forced out", that suggests there were other people whose money was tied up in the company, and so he actually had a financial responsibility to read the room better than he evidently did, just from your description.
Part of the responsibility of working a day job in a company is not to shit the desk. I'm hard pressed to call this basic social requirement "cancel culture".
"But it was just a joke!" "No Grandpa, you're just a racist."
You're right though, it is a lot more prevalent than just high profile cases. But I also assume your friend deserved it.
Don't speak for others.
My personal experience is that women I never had romantic relationships with pretended that I raped them to get influence or money (once as a teen, once as an adult). Talking about this openly 3 friends have told me that similar things have happened to them. But I also won't give you specifics so you'll probably assume that we deserved it.
This subthread is literally a response to someone speaking on behalf of a friend.
And that logic is a little suspect: cancel culture is such a pervasive threat that (1) no one can talk about it happening despite (2) everyone talking about it happening everywhere, pervasively, without evidence.
That doesn't seem off to you?