The CEO of Tesla seems to think it does. He tried to bail on the Twitter acquisition at the last second. Didn't work out well obviously.

Pretty sure he has the exact same attitude to the liabilities involving people getting killed by using his "Full Self Driving" beta test.

It's for PR, so that they can publicly release statistics showing good results on paper. An average consumer will learn the good-looking statistics and spread the word about Tesla safety, as it already happens, without taking the above report into account, since it's buried underneath tens of comments and I imagine Tesla will also fight it in some ways. Then, the average consumer will believe that FSD is indeed safer than a human driver, and buy the system. If crash happens, Tesla doesn't provide legal liability. I imagine most cases will be closed and, overall, Tesla will be at a profit, so why not do it?

Not intended to absolve them legally but likely rather to create grey area for public announcements.

at best the only value I'd see is the ability to have newspaper write "tesla SDV wasn't on when crash happened".. actually a good amount of PR leverage I admit

It's the old capitalist adage, "the pilot never goes down with the ship"