The city of Austin, Texas, was suffocating under the sweltering Friday afternoon heat. Inside the X-Corp headquarters, it was so quiet you could hear the hum of the cooling fans from the Dojo supercomputer running at full throttle.

Ethan, a senior software engineer who had dedicated five years to Musk’s various ventures, stared blankly at his monitor. He had just received an internal email with a subject line consisting of two words: “Rule 001.”

From: Elon Musk.

The body of the email contained a single line: “At this company, we build the future through absolute precision. Starting tomorrow at 6:00 AM, any employee who violates the ‘Communication Lean’ rule—no matter how minor—will be terminated immediately without severance. No exceptions. It is time to filter out the noise.”

Chapter 1: Precision or Death

What was this “minor rule”? The entire building buzzed with anxiety. By evening, a detailed memo was released: Every email or report sent to a superior was forbidden from containing filler words like “perhaps,” “I think,” or “maybe.” Most importantly, the use of ellipses (…) was strictly banned. Musk argued that ellipses were a sign of hesitation, indecision, and a waste of the reader’s time.

Ethan let out a bitter laugh. He knew Elon was extreme, but this felt more like a game of survival than corporate management.

“Losing a job over three little dots?” Sarah, the colleague sitting next to Ethan, asked with a trembling voice. She was a single mother, and her job at X-Corp was the only lifeline for her family.

“Don’t let emotions get in the way, Sarah,” Ethan warned. “Write like a machine. That’s what he wants.”

Chapter 2: The Silent Purge

By Monday morning, the atmosphere in the office was as heavy as lead. No one engaged in small talk. The clatter of keyboards sounded like machine-gun fire.

At 10:00 AM, the first announcement blared over the internal intercom: “Starlink Engineer, Sector B4, please pack your belongings. You have violated Rule 001.”

The reason? In a progress report, the engineer had written: “The system will be stable… by next week.” Those three tiny dots had triggered the AI text-scanning algorithm, and a termination notice was automatically signed with Elon’s digital signature.

By the end of the day, fifty people were gone. The office began to feel hollow. Expensive ergonomic chairs sat empty, and monitors remained dark like polished tombstones.

Chapter 3: White Night in the War Room

Elon Musk never appeared on the lower floors. He stayed on the 42nd floor, in a place dubbed “The War Room.” Ethan was summoned there on Tuesday night to address a critical bug in the FSD (Full Self-Driving) system.

As he entered, he saw Elon standing before a floor-to-ceiling window, gazing at the lights of Austin. He looked exhausted, but his eyes still burned with a fanatical light.

“Ethan,” Elon said without turning around. “Why do humans love ambiguity?”

“Sir, sometimes reality isn’t just black and white. There are gray areas that require time to verify,” Ethan replied, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible.

Elon turned, stepping closer to Ethan. “Gray areas are where progress dies. Mars does not accept gray areas. A misplaced semicolon can blow up a billion-dollar starship. I don’t fire people over a punctuation mark. I fire them for a careless attitude toward the survival of humanity.”

Chapter 4: The Mousetrap

The crushing pressure began to cause Ethan to hallucinate. He double-checked every Slack message. He deleted and retyped every sentence. He became a “biological robot” in the truest sense.

On Thursday night, a dire situation arose. Sarah sent Ethan a private message to ask about a snippet of code. In her state of exhaustion, she typed: “Should we check it again?…”

Ethan froze. He knew the AI system scanned even private messages to evaluate “employee mindset.” If he didn’t report or respond to this message, he could be flagged as an accomplice. But if he replied, the AI would register Sarah’s error, and she would be fired instantly.

Sarah was crying at her desk outside. She had no idea she had just signed her own professional death warrant because of a typing habit from her school days.

Ethan looked at the screen. He had the high-level admin privileges to edit that message for her. It was a betrayal of Elon’s rules—but an act of salvation for a human being.

He hit the key. The system logged the intervention.

Chapter 5: The Final Confrontation

Friday morning. Ethan was summoned to the 42nd floor once again. But this time, there was no tea or stories about Mars.

Elon sat behind his desk, the screen displaying Ethan’s system intervention logs.

“You fixed it for her,” Elon said, his voice as cold as deep space. “You broke precision in exchange for cheap pity.”

Ethan stood tall. “I broke the rule to keep what machines don’t have: Understanding. You want to build an empire on Mars, but if that empire only consists of machines that type correctly, it isn’t the future of humanity. It’s a shiny graveyard.”

Elon fell silent for a long time. The entire room seemed to hold its breath. The tension reached its breaking point. Everyone believed Ethan would be the next one thrown out onto the street.

But suddenly, Elon gave a faint smile—the cryptic smile of a man who is always ten steps ahead.

“You know what, Ethan? Rule 001 was actually a Reverse Turing Test. I wasn’t looking for people who follow orders like machines. I already have enough machines. I was looking for people with the backbone to protect their teammates, even in the face of annihilation.”

Elon stood up and walked over to pat Ethan on the shoulder. “You passed. Those fired last week were the ones who saw their colleagues fail and said nothing, or let them fall just to save themselves. They lack the core cohesion required to survive a harsh planet.”

Chapter 6: Epilogue

The “Ellipsis Rule” was abolished shortly after. Those who were fired were invited back with higher salaries, accompanied by a hard-learned lesson about precision and courage.

Ethan returned to his desk. He saw Sarah laughing and talking happily. He opened his laptop, intending to send her a congratulatory note.

He typed: “Everything is okay now.”

But then, he paused. He deleted the period at the end of the sentence and replaced it with three dots: “Everything is okay now…”

Because he knew that with Elon Musk, the game had only just begun. And ambiguity, sometimes, is the only thing that makes us human.