Not all of them can, but some of them can. For instance the people that could reset that 'protected' status. It certainly won't be the tooth fairy doing that, a Twitter employee is much more likely.

It's weird that Musk's didn't have elevated privileges. Trump's account getting hacked has obviously greater potential harm, but Musk's (non-hacked) tweets had demonstrably major financial and legal impact. And if you read the replies to his tweets, you can see they are constantly getting spammed by bitcoin-hawking accounts (even hacked verified accounts) impersonating Musk's display name and avatar.

If Musk didn't get elevated privileges, then who else besides Trump would have them? Or are the protections for Trump just the same emergency bespoke fix that they implemented when his account was previously deleted?

But Biden's account wasn't? Quite peculiar considering the upcoming election.