When we\u2019re discussing anyone with this level of influence, whether it\u2019s in pop culture, on social media or in the US government, it\u2019s impossible to view a viral Instagram endorsement as anything other than a political statement.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”Black Han Sans|||on|||||” text_text_color=”#000000″ header_4_font=”|||on|||||” header_4_text_align=”center” text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”]
Words by Nikki Peach<\/strong><\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2024\/05\/GettyImages-2151834584-e1715270592751.jpg” alt=”Kim Kardashian Mummy makeover” title_text=”The 2024 Met Gala Celebrating %22Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion%22 – Arrivals” force_fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” sticky_enabled=”0″] 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\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0erotic pictures with a Tesla robot.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s eye image of them moving towards each other as if they are about to kiss.<\/p>\n The message, at least to Kardashian\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u2018No one sweeter than you @ivankatrump,\u2019 the reality star wrote alongside a selfie with Ivanka, shared with her 357 million followers. \u2018Kim K posting this a week before the biggest election in history is a deliberate choice and I\u2019m not saying I expected anything more from her or her family but wow,\u2019 one user wrote on X. Others jumped to her defence to say, \u2018Why are y\u2019all surprised lol. They\u2019ve known each other for decades.\u2019<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n However, even after Joe Biden\u2019s 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. \u2018I\u2019m standing w Obama in the midterm election 2morrow!\u2019 she wrote on X, alongside a picture of her and the former president as cartoons from her then-popular mobile game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n With that context, her new friendship with Musk has understandably disappointed a lot of people. \u2018This is terrible. How dare you. Never buying your products again,\u2019 reads one comment under her Perfect magazine post. \u2018Tell me what side you\u2019re on without telling me what side you\u2019re on,\u2019 reads another comment with more than 3,000 likes. A third user put, \u2018This is so disturbing. To play in our faces and say you are for police reform and then do things like this is absolutely insane.\u2019 A fourth simply wrote, \u2018Billionaires stick with billionaires\u2026 not surprised.\u2019<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2025\/03\/Screenshot-2025-03-21-at-12.14.35.png” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text module_class=”custom-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_font=”Libre Bodoni|||on|||||” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#333333″ header_2_font_size=”40px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” global_colors_info=”{}”] 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 \u2018party of kindness\u2019. 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\u2019s government. He is to all intents and purposes Trump\u2019s right-hand man, even joining Trump’s \u2018first family\u2019 photo after the election.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hardly a stretch, then, for fans to read into Kardashian\u2019s cosy photoshoot with the Optimus robot, which is described as a \u2018general purpose, bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot capable of performing unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks\u2019. Of course Musk\u2019s new billionaire friend can play around and take sexy pictures with it for social media, but is that all that’s going on?<\/p>\n 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 \u2018criminal organisation\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018special government employees\u2019 from his own network in the tech industry. That includes people like Marko Elez, who resigned after the Wall Street Journal<\/em> discovered he had posted several racist messages on social media and defended eugenics, but Musk has since reinstated him. Last summer, Elez wrote, \u2018Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.\u2019<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 one that understandably has millions of people living in fear.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider color=”#111111″ divider_position=”center” divider_weight=”2px” module_class=”custom-divider” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” custom_margin=”0px||0px||false|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-texts” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|||on|||||” text_orientation=”center” global_colors_info=”{}”] Photos: <\/b>IMAGO & @kimkardashian via Instagram<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kim Kardashian, take heed, your fans are listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3142,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"guestgrazia","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8019"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8036,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8019\/revisions\/8036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}‘Billionaires stick with billionaires… not surprised’<\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” sticky_enabled=”0″]