Tesla News: Board Could Support Elon Musk Plan To Take Company Private

Tesla's board of directors on Wednesday confirmed that it could approve CEO Elon Musk's plan to take the electric automaker private.

The board, which according to Tesla's official website consists of eight members and Musk, said in a statement that the company had looked into taking the company private last week. The public comments come after Musk caught Wall Street off guard Tuesday with a Twitter posting that read: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."

Shares of Tesla (TSLA) on Monday closed at $341.99 and jumped to as high as $387.46 on Tuesday.

"This included discussion as to how being private could better serve Tesla’s long-term interests, and also addressed the funding for this to occur," six members of the board said in a statement. "The board has met several times over the last week and is taking the appropriate next steps to evaluate this."

In an emailed statement to Tesla employees, Musk said taking the company private is "the best path forward." However, he also stated that so far there was no final decision.

Tesla shares first went public in June 2010.

Musk, who owns a 20-percent stake in Tesla, said he hoped the decision would protect the company from distractions for it to meet quarterly goals and end "negative propaganda" against the company.

Musk's Tuesday tweets coincided with a Financial Times report that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had attained an undisclosed stake of less than 5 percent in Tesla worth just over $2 billion.

"I think it fits into two strategies that the public investment fund is following, pursuing," Riad Hamade said on Bloomberg Tuesday. "One is that they are trying to increase their investment outside Saudi Arabia."

Hamade added that the second strategy is the fund's interest in the tech industry.

More questions, however, surround the direction of Tesla, which has a market capitalization of close to $63 billion. Other major companies that have delisted in the last six years, including Burger King, Dell and Panera Bread.

James Albertine, an analyst at Consumer Edge Research, told CNBC on Tuesday how the shift from public to private could relieve some pressure off Tesla. "There is absolutely something to this I think in the argument that going private might make more sense than remaining sort of a volatile conversation in the public markets," Albertine said.

This wasn't the first time Musk has mulled the idea of his electric automaker going private. "I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company," he said in a November 2017 Rolling Stone profile.

Meanwhile, Musk's comments on Twitter may have violated Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fair-disclosure rules.

“You’re not allowed to issue misleading information that investors could act on, and it looks like investors acted on it,” Peter Henning, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Wayne State University Law School specializing in securities law, told the Detroit Free Press.