(Headline USA) Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to explore legal action against Twitter’s board of directors this week after they moved to block billionaire Elon Musk from acquiring more of the company’s stock.
Musk sent an offer to the Twitter board last week offering to buy the company outright and take it private, so that he could “unlock” its “potential.” Twitter has not given Musk a formal response, but it did activate a so-called “poison pill” to prevent shareholders from acquiring more than 15% of the company’s stock.
In response, DeSantis said his team is reviewing options for legal action against Twitter’s board of directors “to hold them accountable for breaching their fiduciary duty.” He has the authority to go after Twitter since Florida, through its Retirement System pension fund, is an investor in the company, he noted.
“I can just tell you, the State of Florida, in our pension system, we have shares of Twitter. I didn’t buy it, we have people that run the fund. Nevertheless, it hasn’t exactly been great on returns on investment,” he said during a press conference on Tuesday.
“It’s been pretty stagnant for many, many years. So, nevertheless, to me, I think that’s probably an injury to the fund. We’re going to be looking at ways that the State of Florida can potentially be holding these Twitter board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duties. So stay tuned on that.”
DeSantis argued that the Twitter board’s decision had nothing to do with shareholders’ best financial interests, and everything to do with their desire to control the narrative.
“They rejected it because they know they can’t control Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “They know that he will not accept the narrative and that their little play toy of Twitter, it would not be used to enforce orthodoxy.
“And so that’s why they did it. It was not, in my judgment, because it wasn’t a good business deal.”
DeSantis also cited a number of incidents in which Twitter displayed an obvious bias against conservative users, such as the New York Post and Babylon Bee.
“They were censoring accounts like the Babylon Bee, which is a satirical site. But they don’t like it because, you know, it’s satire, but it cuts and they don’t like when people are effective like that,” he said.
“And so you saw how it had been really used to control the narrative, not to give the ability of people to speak their mind.
“They advertise themselves as being a platform dedicated to the free expression of ideas and yet, you know when you have a New York Post article about Hunter Biden, what do they do?” he continued. “They take it down. They lock the New York Post’s account.”
DeSantis said that it would be a better move financially and politically for Twitter to accept Musk’s offer.
“What Musk is trying to do is, in a sense, liberate it from being an agent of censorship into making it an actual open platform,” he said.
