In one of the most egregious recent examples of a rich celebrity misreading the room, Kim Kardashian has shared images of a recent editorial she shot with Perfect magazine in which she poses on a Tesla Cybertruck and with a Tesla robot.
Many of the photos, taken by Steven Klein for a special edition of Perfect magazine, show Kardashian posing in the back of a Tesla Cybertruck, while in others she can be seen embracing a Tesla robot, including one photo where she and the robot are lying on a mattress next to the ocean in an embrace.
Kardashian is no stranger to being out of touch, but using Tesla products as props after almost two straight months of Tesla CEO Elon Musk assisting President Donald Trump in decimating the U.S. federal government is bound to produce a significant backlash.
Negative comments have already begun rolling in on Instagram, with multiple users asking Kardashian what exactly it is they’re looking at, while one person joked, “Iconic! (If that truck was on fire!),” a reference to the fact that Tesla vehicles and dealerships have been targeted by vandals across the United States and Europe as an act of protest against the Musk-Trump oligarchy.
As a result, Tesla owners are abandoning their vehicles in droves, and those who aren’t are going out of their way to stress that their ownership of a Tesla vehicle does not constitute an endorsement of Musk or Trump.
This mass exodus, which has seen Tesla’s stock tank, led to an incredibly surreal scene where Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom in an attempt to drum up sales for the company. When asked outright if he thought his stunt would improve the company’s sales, he responded, “Well, I hope it does.”
For her part, however, Kardashian does not appear to be making a political statement; she explained in her interview with Perfect, “I think the big joke of me even doing the shoot with the robot is that I feel like I’m so robotic.”
Timing is everything, however. The release of this issue after such a chaotic week for Tesla means that the editorial looks like little more than an advertisement for the car manufacturer. Musk is sure to be thrilled.