Florida governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to punish Twitter for blocking Elon Musk’s $43bn takeover of the social media platform.

The Twitter board activated a “poison pill” strategy to defend itself against the Tesla entrepreneur’s stunning attempt to buy the company, which he announced last week.

“We’re gonna be looking at ways the state of Florida potentially can be holding these Twitter board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duty,” the Republican politician said.

“The state of Florida and our pension system, we have shares of Twitter, I didn’t buy it we have peopel that run the fund. But, nevertheless, it hasnt exactly been great on returns on investment, it has been pretty stagnant for many, many years. To me, I think that is probably an injury to the fund.”

And he told his upporters to “stay tuned” on action against the Twitter board and said that Mr Musk was trying to “liberate” the platform from censorship.

“They did a 20 per cent premium, and the board of directors effectively rejected that by doing a ‘poison pill’,” he added.

“The question is why would you reject the 20 per cent premium? I don’t think that wa a rejection based on financial concerns or business jedgement.

“They rejected it because they know they can’t control Elon Musk, they know he will not accept the narrtive, and that their little play toy of Twitter would not be used to enfore orthodoxy and to basically prop-up the regime and these failed legacy media outlets.

“That is why they did it, it was not in my judgement because it was not a good business deal and the question now is what is the recourse.”