Last Updated Aug 7, 2018 1:53 PM EDT
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Tuesday that he was considering taking the company private, sending the stock up more than 5 percent.
“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk tweeted shortly before 1 p.m. on Tuesday.
It’s unclear if Musk, who is known for using Twitter to vent as much as outline company strategy, is seriously weighing taking the company, which only went public in 2010, private. Some on social media guessed the stock price Musk cited is a thinly veiled veiled marijuana joke referencing April 20, the unofficial “weed day” recognized by pot users.
Investors, by contrast, seem to take Musk’s declaration seriously. Tesla’s stock, which was trading at about $342 per share, shot up to $365 per share immediately after the tweet. The stock was already up Tuesday after the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia had taken a $2 billion stake in the electric car company.
Representatives for Tesla did not immediately confirm the tweet was genuine.
Musk is Tesla’s largest shareholder, with an approximately 20 percent stake valued at about $12 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ.
It isn’t the first time Musk has previously expressed a wish to take Tesla private, telling Rolling Stone last year that “it actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.” He is famously disdainful of Wall Street, getting into a verbal argument with an analyst on a May earnings call for posing “boring bonehead questions.”
Tesla has been under pressure from Wall Street to reduce its cash burn and turn a consistent profit. Key to that plan is ramping up production of the Model 3, a $35,000 mass-market model that has run into production and quality issues.
— CBS News’ Jillian Harding contributed reporting.
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