Nah: If anybody was actually holding Musk "ultimately at fault regardless of anything else", we wouldn't be talking about settling a product-safety lawsuit, but instead about a criminal trial for manslaughter.

Since that's not the case--and I don't think anyone has even suggested it needs to be--we can safely infer that there's already a high degree of nuance and splitting of different levels and layers of responsibility going on.

At the end of the day, "operator error"--even drunken operator error--is not enough to automatically negate all safety flaws.