If you don't think Elon Musk is a "state/corporate controlled entity" then I can't say anything meaningful to you about him.
People have been (correctly) making those claims about him since back in the aughts when I *liked* him. I didn't want to believe it then, or just ignored it, but it's true.
However, many people say Jack Dorsey's twitter was more open and free. Dorsey went too far at times, but he at least listened and he's actually come to regret a lot about Twitter. Perhaps he wouldn't say he regrets creating it completely, since that is what allowed him to come to these conclusions (and what made him billions of dollars), but he no longer sees Twitter as the proper way to create a short form one-to-many messaging platform. (He's correctly concluded that it shouldn't be a company at all, but instead an open source protocol, as SMTP is for email and HTTP for websites).
There is a long list of people who would argue that new Twitter is more censored, and many of them are people I would like to hear from. I suppose it depends on personal tastes whether one considers the newer or older twitter more "free."
But the new twitter is definitely getting more free in certain areas:
Testing NSFW adult communities (open pornography)
Sports betting is coming to X through a BetMGM Partnership
I suppose fans of those things will be happy. And it will likely reverse the 25% drop in users since he purchased the app.
Even if it doesn't return to profitability, 44 billion is a huge wad of cash. The site could easily run for the rest of his life without making a dime or gaining a single user.
The future of the service is pretty troubling though. They recently allowed the company to collect biometric data from all users (this is probably why they banned third party apps, so all users are subject to biometric collection) and allow paid political content for the first time. I guess if you are a Democratic or Republican politician, the service just got a whole lot freer for you.
But of course there were some people who were unbanned, and I suppose if you enjoy their content, as I said, you think the current X.com is more free. As for a societal communication and free thought discussion forum, though, I don't think one can effectively make that argument.
The bottom line is the type of voices that could possibly help start a revolutionary change in American society are simply not allowed on X. There is never going to be an "American Spring" type movement coming from X.