This extremely perverse situation tells us a good bit about a lot of our fellow citizens but nothing about what the rest of us can get away with nor the constraints placed upon us.
If I said something that was misconstrued sufficiently enough for thousands of people to hear about it and hate me even wrongly I wouldn't be giving up my position at MIT I would probably end up homeless until lack of Asthma medication caused me to suffocate.
Part of that not having billions of dollars to fall back on thing.
If you or I said something stupid, it'd either not be noticed much at all, or get 15 minutes of fame and then fade into obscurity. In reality, our lives wouldn't change all that much. Yes, there's an outside chance that we could do something so dumb that we'd lose our jobs, but that's vanishingly unlikely, and still, I'd expect the effect to be temporary.