Elon Musk reportedly shuts two Twitter offices in India as cost-cutting continues

Move limits social media company's presence to one city in the country

Elon Musk fired more than half of Twitter's employees, raising concerns there may not be enough people to carry out oversight roles in key areas of its operations. Reuters

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk has reportedly shut down two offices in India's capital New Delhi and financial centre Mumbai as part of the social media company's cost-cutting measures.

The move leaves the company with only one office in the country, in the technology centre of Bengaluru, Bloomberg reported, citing sources.

Twitter had yet to respond to an emailed request for comment from The National, which was sent outside operating hours.

It remains unclear how the move will affect the microblogging platform's operations in India, which is considered a key market for global technology companies because of its 1.4 billion population and a growing number of tech-focused users.

Mr Musk has fired more than half of Twitter's employees after his $44 billion acquisition in October, raising concerns that there may not be enough people to carry out oversight roles in key areas of its operations.

The billionaire had previously claimed that the company was losing $4 million a day, and laid out plans to boost the platform's revenue by five times to $26.4 billion by 2028.

In its last financial report before its acquisition, the company swung to a net loss of more than $270 million in the second quarter of 2022, compared to a net income of about $65.6 million in the same period a year earlier.

Twitter is also moving forward with plans to introduce a payments feature on its platform, steering it towards Mr Musk's plans to tap into new revenue streams, the Financial Times reported last month.

The company had applied for regulatory licences across the US, the paper said.

Speaking at the World Government Summit this week, Mr Musk said the journey so far has been “quite a rollercoaster” as he tries to “stabilise Twitter”.

He said that he went ahead with the purchase because he wanted to create a trusted digital platform.

“I was a little worried about the effect of social media on the world, especially Twitter, and I thought it was very important that there should be a trusted digital public sphere, with the least amount of censorship allowed by law,” said Mr Musk.

“Twitter was, I think, doing a little too much to impose a niche San Francisco-Berkeley ideology on the world.”

He also said that he hopes to hire a chief executive for the social media platform by end of this year.