So is firing and even suing an employee for disseminating your proprietary code, but few would argue that that is censorship, in the free speech sense.

If someone was a purported free speech absolutist, then yes that would be censorship. It would be a violation of copyright law, but copyright law and censorship can easily be argued to go hand in hand.

Which is partly why free speech absolutists cannot exist. Eventually, everyone draws a line in the sand. In the case of Elon Musk, that line in the sand seems to move depending on whom does the censoring.

Who ever said he is an absolutist? I have only seen that claim from critics making a no true Scott's an argument. At a minimum he said he will regulate illegal content.

He's literally referred to himself as a free speech absolutist [1]. I don't know how much more explicit it can get here. Unless you want to argue that he's a hypocrite and his words have no meaning or something, in which case that's precisely the problem a lot of people have with him and his 'free speech' stance.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?s=20...

It could be argued that dissemination of someone else's speech isn't your speech, and thus there's no hypocrisy.