Thank you - excellent answer. This raises the obvious question - to what degree is a public company protected from liability by relying on its counsel - if that counsel made a mistake? Can an attorney round up a bunch of folks who bought the offering, then attempt to sue Tesla and say that the shares were overpriced because Tesla left out a material fact? And if so, let's hypothesize that you are right - Tesla's attorneys did make a mistake and the AP fatality is deemed to be material by a judge. What then? Would Tesla have some kind of giant liability insurance policy which would pay out $ as a judgement or settlement for Tesla in a case like this because the CEO simply did what his lawyers said he could do? Or would Tesla have to pay $ in some way from its own coffers, not those of its insurance company.
If a public company relies on counsel to not include a fact that turns out to be material, counsel could be held liable if a court finds that counsel did not act reasonably in making the determination. And yes, absolutely, many securities class actions have been filed based on claims of material omissions. The odds are that it would be an expensive back and forth between Tesla and the lawyers' malpractice carrier and it would take forever to settle. The likely sequence would be that Tesla loses a 10b-5 claim, pays out the damages and files a claim against the law firm that provided the SEC counsel.
As a Tesla owner who finds Autopilot to be a very useful tool, I think this will end up being much ado about nothing, but it most certainly will get the government poking around and mucking up the adoption of the technology.