I wish more people would understand this. For people like Musk, his personal brand is extremely important and they spend a lot of effort portraying and selling a specific image. It is an important part of his success as a businessman. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative.
Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does. In his view Twitter is free speech. An attack on Twitter (as he alleged Apple was doing) is an attack on free speech. Twitter dying means the death of free speech. To claim that a company is the embodiment of free speech is ridiculous yet so many people buy into it.