...and then he made a Tropic Thunder reference.

Current Events. 500 words, 2 minute read. With Claude Sonnet.

The blue notification light pulsed in the corner of Elon's vision like a dying star. His eyes burned from 20 straight hours of screen time, the Austin skyline outside his wall-to-wall windows shifting from burnt orange to deep purple. Empty Red Bull cans formed a half-circle around his standing desk—his own private Raptor engine launch array.

His phone buzzed. Again.

"God-tier dopamine hit," he mumbled, thumbing through the congratulatory DMs. Post-election euphoria mixed with caffeine jitters as he pulled up Twitter's admin dashboard. The platform's algorithmic content promotion network hummed beneath his fingertips, ready to reshape reality with a few keystrokes.

"Yo, E-man." His head of operations, Dave, materialized in his office doorway. "Immigration policy working group's been waiting on the Zoom call for like 45 minutes. They're getting pretty pissed about the H1-B stuff."

Elon cracked his neck, a half-smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "Let them get pissed. Sometimes you need to break a few eggs to make a sustainable Mars colony and lead humanity to a multiplanetary future, you know what I mean?"

"...No?"

"Exactly." His fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard, its clicks echoing like miniature sonic booms. "Watch this."

"Jesus," Dave muttered, watching the engagement numbers explode. "The board's going to have an aneurysm."

"The board can have several aneurysms," Elon replied, already drafting his follow-up. The new Department of Government Efficiency badge gleamed in his Twitter bio—a private-public partnership that was beginning to feel more like a hostile takeover than a simple cost-cutting initiative.

Just the way he liked it.

His screen filled with notifications: death threats from right-wing accounts, praise from Silicon Valley, confused journalists trying to parse his true angle. But between the rage and adoration, other messages started appearing. Engineers from Pakistan describing rejected visas. Brazilian AI researchers with groundbreaking papers and nowhere to publish them. A quantum computing team in Nigeria that had built a prototype with spare parts.

Elon leaned back, the leather chair creaking beneath him. The dying light caught the empty Red Bull cans, casting long shadows across his desk like gleaming terraformed tower silhouettes on Mars.

His phone buzzed with another board member's call. He declined it.

"Dave," he said, "get me the immigration policy team. And order some pizza. The good stuff, not that CPU-grade cardboard from last time."

"What are you thinking?"

Elon's fingers hovered over the keyboard. "I'm thinking it's time to make immigration less stupid."

The next tweet would cost him followers, allies, maybe even board seats. But he'd never built anything worthwhile by playing it safe. Besides, someone had to beta test the future.

He began to type, confident that nobody in the entire world—no, the entire universe—could stop him.

---