It was a regular March evening; the birds were beginning to chirp, and the blossom was rearing its head when Kim Kardashian posted a sequence of not not erotic pictures with a Tesla robot.

In one photo, she is seen lying on a mattress on the beach with said robot, not a scrap of trousers on (her, not the robot) with one leg draped over it as its hand (do we call it a hand?) perches affectionately on her knee. Now is as good a time as any to ask, what on earth is going on?

It turns out the pictures are from a shoot for Perfect magazine, which were taken last November. Elsewhere, we see Kardashian and the bot taking selfies next to a cyber truck, posing for photos in outlandish outfits on deck chairs while holding hands and a bird’s eye image of them moving towards each other as if they are about to kiss.

The message, at least to Kardashian’s followers, is clear: she is in bed with Big Tech. In the current political climate, where Tesla CEO Elon Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Trump, that means she is seemingly aligning herself with hard-line Republicanism.

While Kardashian did not endorse Trump in those exact words ahead of the last election, she did post a birthday message for his daughter Ivanka six days before, which many people took as confirmation of who she would be voting for. ‘No one sweeter than you @ivankatrump,’ the reality star wrote alongside a selfie with Ivanka, shared with her 357 million followers. ‘Kim K posting this a week before the biggest election in history is a deliberate choice and I’m not saying I expected anything more from her or her family but wow,’ one user wrote on X. Others jumped to her defence to say, ‘Why are y’all surprised lol. They’ve known each other for decades.’

Ivanka and Kardashian were first pictured together in 2014 at the Met Gala. In 2018, they became friendlier while Ivanka was working as her father’s senior advisor and Kardashian was working with him under her new capacity as a lawyer. The reality star famously landed a meeting with Trump to discuss the case of Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a non-violent drug offence, and Trump granted Johnson clemency a week later. This marked the start of a burgeoning political alliance.

However, even after Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, Kardashian presented as a Democrat, sharing a photo of the new president and Kamala Harris on X with three blue heart emojis. She famously endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and did so again during the midterms in 2014. ‘I’m standing w Obama in the midterm election 2morrow!’ she wrote on X, alongside a picture of her and the former president as cartoons from her then-popular mobile game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

Even if her political statements have been cloaked in fairly evident self-interest at times, until recently, it was always possible to argue that she had good intentions. Sure, she promoted her work on criminal justice reform with posed pictures of her studying in a bikini, but she also helped free women facing unjustly long sentences from prison, supported the First Step Act, which allows prisoners convicted of nonviolent drug offences to reduce their sentences for good behaviour and supported the 90 Days of Freedom Campaign, which assisted in the release of 17 nonviolent drug offenders.

With that context, her new friendship with Musk has understandably disappointed a lot of people. ‘This is terrible. How dare you. Never buying your products again,’ reads one comment under her Perfect magazine post. ‘Tell me what side you’re on without telling me what side you’re on,’ reads another comment with more than 3,000 likes. A third user put, ‘This is so disturbing. To play in our faces and say you are for police reform and then do things like this is absolutely insane.’ A fourth simply wrote, ‘Billionaires stick with billionaires… not surprised.’

It’s true that Musk and Kardashian have more in common than it may seem. Aside from both being billionaires, they also have wavering political affiliations. Until 2022, Musk was a self-proclaimed Democrat voter, calling it the ‘party of kindness’. He denounced the party the same year he bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, arguably turning the platform into a pro-Trump echo chamber. Since then, Musk has bedded roots on the right, moving the X and SpaceX headquarters away from left-leaning California to Texas, and landing a prime position in Trump’s government. He is to all intents and purposes Trump’s right-hand man, even joining Trump’s ‘first family’ photo after the election.

It’s hardly a stretch, then, for fans to read into Kardashian’s cosy photoshoot with the Optimus robot, which is described as a ‘general purpose, bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot capable of performing unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks’. Of course Musk’s new billionaire friend can play around and take sexy pictures with it for social media, but is that all that’s going on?

Unfortunately, if you dig deeper into this new partnership there is little to laugh about. In less than 100 days since joining government, Musk has already shut down the pre-eminent international aid agency, USAid, calling it a ‘criminal organisation’. Not only is it being debated whether this move violates US constitution, but analysis has already confirmed that it could lead to several thousands deaths. A federal judge has since blocked the government from shutting it down further.

Given that Musk effectively controls the office of personnel management (OPM), which oversees federal employment, he encouraged more than 2 million government workers to resign as soon as he took office and is curating a team of ‘special government employees’ from his own network in the tech industry. That includes people like Marko Elez, who resigned after the Wall Street Journal discovered he had posted several racist messages on social media and defended eugenics, but Musk has since reinstated him. Last summer, Elez wrote, ‘Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.’

Then there’s Musk’s salute, which he debuted on a world stage at Trump’s inauguration, drawing widespread comparisons to the Nazi salute. All of these events would be alarming in isolation, but together they paint a deeply disturbing picture of the future under Trump and Musk – one that understandably has millions of people living in fear.

Why, then, would Kardashian want to knowingly align herself with any of it? There might be millions to gain, but she has her entire reputation, a legacy in pop culture and decades’ worth of loyal fans to lose.