DUBAI: Twitter boss Elon Musk said Wednesday that a new CEO might be running the online platform by the end of 2023, after a "rollercoaster" since he took full ownership last year. "I'm guessing probably towards the end of this year should be good timing to find someone else to run the company," he told the World Government Summit conference in Dubai via video. "I need to stabilize the organization and make sure it's in a healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out... I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year."

Musk was speaking at Dubai's WGS in the session 'A Conversation with Elon Musk 2.0', which was moderated by Mohammed Abdullah Al-Gergawi, the UAE's Minister of Cabinet Affairs and WGS chairman. It was almost six years after he first spoke at Dubai's World Government Summit. About 20 heads of state, ministers, CEOs, thought leaders and celebrities have addressed this year's World Government Summit in Dubai.

Musk paid $44 billion for his favorite social media platform and exiting day-to-day operations would allow him to deflect criticism that he is neglecting his other ventures, especially car company Tesla, which has seen its share price plummet since he took over Twitter. Musk has given few clues to what type of leader he is looking for. On December 21, when he first announced he planned to step down as CEO, he said only that he would limit his own duties to software and server engineering once "someone foolish enough" had taken his place.

Since Musk took full ownership of Twitter on October 27, the platform has been riven by chaos, with mass layoffs, the return of banned accounts and the suspension of journalists critical of the South African-born billionaire. Musk's takeover also saw a surge in racist or hateful tweets, drawing scrutiny from regulators and chasing away big advertisers, Twitter's primary source of revenue.

"It has been a rollercoaster," Musk told the Dubai conference. Last week, thousands of Twitter users reported problems using the platform as the social network began letting paying users post tweets as long as 4,000 characters. US tech media reported that Musk put out word to Twitter staff to put aside work on new features to focus on troubleshooting.

Tesla was "really on the verge of bankruptcy for quite a while," Musk explained to the attendees at the summit during his virtual talk. Despite the difficulties, the Twitter boss encouraged more communication. "As a forum for communication, it's great. And I would just encourage more communication... to sort of speak in an authentic voice. "Sometimes, people will have someone else be their sort of Twitter manager or something like that. People should just do their own tweets... I think that's the way to do it."

"If you think I was a little worried about the direction about the effect of social media on the world, and especially Twitter, and I thought it was very important for there to be a maximally trusted, sort of digital public square, where people work within countries and internationally to communicate with the least amount of censorship allowed by law," he said. "But I think in general, social media companies should adhere to the laws of our countries and not try to put a thumb on the scale beyond the laws of countries...and more accurately reflect the (needs of) the people."

He said while this might invite criticism, he acknowledge that "I am constantly attacked on Twitter and frankly I don't mind." "AI has great, great promise...but also with that comes danger. The challenge here is that the government regulatory authorities tend to be set up in reaction to something bad that happened."

"So, I think we should be quite concerned about it, and we should have some regulation of what it is fundamentally of the interests of the public Because think of any technology which is potentially a risk to people like if it's an aircraft or cars or medicine, we have regulatory bodies that oversee the public safety of cars and planes and medicines." - AFP