Musk unveils timeline for appointing new Twitter CEO

SAN FRANCISCO -- Elon Musk is aiming to "find someone else" to run Twitter by the end of this year.

He first needs to "stabilize the organization" and make sure "it's financially in a healthy place," Musk said Wednesday, speaking via videolink at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

"Probably towards the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company," he said. "I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year."

In December, the billionaire said he would step down as Twitter's CEO but only when he identified a successor, after millions of Twitter users voted for his ouster in a poll that he set up on the platform.

Musk tweeted at the time that he would resign "as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" He added that, following his resignation as CEO, he would "run the software & servers teams" at Twitter, indicating that he might continue to hold sway over much of the company's decision-making.

Musk's tenure as CEO has resulted in sweeping, occasionally erratic shifts at one of the world's most influential social media companies.

In a fresh sign of Musk's uneven impact at Twitter, data from analytics firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower showed that over half of Twitter's top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first few weeks of January.