Musk says he has ‘too much on plate’ amid reports of more Twitter job cuts

Elon Musk has said he has "too much work on my plate" as it was reported that Twitter has axed more than 4,000 contractors working in areas including content moderation and engineering.

The Tesla chief executive and the social media platform's new owner told the B20 business leaders' conference in Bali that "my workload has recently increased quite a lot", in apparent reference to his $44bn (£37bn) acquisition of the social media platform on 27 October.

"I mean, oh, man. I have too much work on my plate, that is for sure," he added, speaking via video link.

Asked what it felt like to be a "media mogul" after buying Twitter he said: "It is a medium as opposed to media. But there's no way to make everyone happy, that's for sure."

Musk's comments on Monday followed a report at the weekend that a new jobs cull at Twitter had affected 4,400 of the company's 5,500 contract employees, according to Casey Newton, the author of the tech industry newsletter Platformer.

Functions affected included content moderation, marketing and "core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running".

The move follows the firing of more than 3,700 full-time Twitter employees at the beginning of the month, days after the social media platform was bought by Musk.