File photo: Tesla Motors Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk
Tesla Inc's board named a special committee of three directors on Tuesday which will evaluate Elon Musk's proposals to take the company private, although it said it was yet to see a firm offer from the company's chief executive.
Musk said on Monday he was in talks with a Saudi sovereign fund for taking the electric car maker private. He later tweeted he was working with buyout firm Silver Lake and investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc as financial advisers on his plan.
The special committee is composed of independent directors Brad Buss, Robyn Denholm and Linda Johnson Rice.
Buss served as chief financial officer of solar panel installer SolarCity for two years before retiring in 2016. Tesla bought SolarCity that year.
Denholm, the first woman to join Tesla's board, is chief operations officer of telecom firm Telstra and the ex-CFO of network gear maker Juniper Networks.
Rice, the first African-American and second woman to join the company's board, is the chairman of Johnson Publishing Co, home to Ebony and Jet magazines.
The special committee has the authority to take any action on behalf of the board to evaluate and negotiate a potential transaction and alternatives to any transaction proposed by Musk, the company said in the statement.
Latham and Watkins LLP has been retained by the committee as its legal counsel. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati will be legal counsel for Tesla itself.
Shares in Tesla, which are still well below highs hit when Musk initially raised the prospect of the transaction last week, inched up 0.7 percent in trading before the bell.
Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has been pushing to take electric carmaker Tesla private in talks with Chief Executive Elon Musk dating back nearly two years and also backed the deal last week, Musk said in a blog post on Monday.Musk last week shocked investors with his announcement on Twitter that he was looking to take Tesla private at $420 a share, valuing the company at $72 billion. He provided no details on funding except that it was "secured"."Going back almost two years, the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has approached me multiple times about taking Tesla private," Musk wrote in a blog post https://www.tesla.com/blog/upd... on Monday."They first met with me at the beginning of 2017 to express this interest because of the important need to diversify away from oil. They then held several additional meetings with me over the next year to reiterate this interest and to try to move forward with a going private transaction."Obviously, the Saudi sovereign fund has more than enough capital needed to execute on such a transaction."Musk said that since his Twitter posts last week the managing director of the Saudi fund had expressed support for proceeding with the deal subject to financial and other due diligence."I left the July 31st meeting (with the fund) with no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed, and that it was just a matter of getting the process moving," Musk said."This is why I referred to 'funding secured' in the August 7th announcement." 
Musk says Saudi fund pushed for two years to take Tesla private