Yes. For courtiers. When a white elephant was discovered and brought to the King, it was seen as a symbol of great prestige. It wasn't a burden on the King because the King was inordinately wealthy and had vast royal stables set up specifically for the care of elephants. The city of Ayutthaya experienced and encouraged several large waves of Mon refugees from Burma, and many entered (or were forced into) military service. In particular Mon soldiers were used to maintain the royal elephant stables, and their duties would have included both the care of "prestige" animals such as white elephants, as well as the capture and training of war elephants. Clearly there was ample royal infrastructure in place so that the discovery of a new white elephant could only be a boon to the King. A courtier or noble, however, would not have had anything like this sort of pre-built infrastructure. And it wasn't just a matter of caring for the elephant itself (a difficult enough task), to receive the gift of a white elephant came with additional social responsibilities that were expensive to uphold while providing little in the way of political gain.
I would instead suggest an event that would give Ayutthaya the opportunity to lose prestige (since the King would no longer own the elephant) in exchange for reducing the power of the Noble estate.
(Royal ownership of white elephants was also something that Kings liked to brag about. For example, in a set of notes provided to the Siamese ambassador to Portugal in 1684, the ambassador is instructed to mention the two white elephants held in the royal stables at the time. It is unclear if the Portuguese would have understood this as being prestigious outside of how the maintenance of a menagerie was in Europe.)
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