Plaintiffs in the case failed to show Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other officials committed fraud with statements such as the autopilot on average being safer than normal drivers, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Sept. 30 ruling.

Musk said during a 2019 investor event that "we publish accidents per mile every quarter, and what we see right now is that autopilot is about twice as safe as a normal driver on average." That same year, he wrote on Twitter (now X) that "buying a car in 2019 that can't upgrade to full self-driving is like buying a horse instead of a car in 1919."

Those and other statements were false and misleading because they overstated the effectiveness of autopilot and omitted key information, according to the suit, brought by investor Thomas Lamontagne. The Securities Exchange Act prohibits making business-related statements that are manipulative or deceptive.

Tesla lawyers defended the statements, saying they were protected because they were forward-looking and accompanied by cautionary language.

Olguín sided with Tesla, finding that some of the statements "are plainly forward-looking statements of Tesla's plans and objectives" and thus meet a safe harbor provision in federal law.

"Plaintiffs have failed to allege that these challenged statements contain such 'concrete' assertions of 'current or past fact,'" the judge said.

Tesla and its officials also used cautionary language, such as telling investors that actual results could differ from projections.

A number of the statements, however, were not forward-looking, but plaintiffs did not show that Musk knew the statements were false, meaning they're protected by another safe harbor provision, according to the ruling.