All on their own, the photos are bad. Kim Kardashian’s photoshoot for indie fashion mag Perfect features her vamping atop a Tesla Cybertruck and sprawled in post-coital bliss with a Tesla robot by the sea. The premise would be unpleasant and leaden in the best of times.
But if the photos are bad, the timing is worse. Pics from the Steven Klein shoot were released on Friday, on a week when the “Tesla Takedown” movement protesting Musk at Tesla dealerships worldwide was making news. So much news, in fact, that Trump himself felt inspired to stage a pro-Tesla showcase event at the White House, vowing to buy a Tesla himself to support his comrade.
And in the midst of all this, here comes Kim Kardashian, literally draping herself across Tesla products, like that SNL sketch about Julia Louis-Dreyfus hitting on the pool boy. What could these images mean besides an enthusiastic endorsement for Musk’s vision of the future?
Elon Musk certainly appreciated the gesture! When Kardashian posted the shoot on X/Twitter, the Tesla CEO turned DOGE boss commented with the “robot arm flexing” and heart emoji—high praise indeed.
“I think the big joke of me even doing the shoot with the robot is that I feel like I’m so robotic,” Kardashian said irrelevantly in the promo for the issue. Even robots these days can read the room better than this, though.
On Instagram—a platform Kardashian is practically synonymous with—reaction was swift and negative after she posted evidence of the Perfect magazine shoot on Friday. The top comment, with over 20,000 likes all on its own, is “never buying skims again,” referring to the line of shapewear that Kardashian owns, which is promoted at the top of her page. “I’m kinda sick to my stomach rn.”
Actually, that was the top comment. It was vanished from Kardashian’s page by Monday midday, suggesting that the backlash had become a PR crisis to be managed. (I reached out to person who posted the comment, who confirmed that she had not deleted it herself.)
The shoot may be the biggest political fashion fail since Melania Trump’s “I Don’t Care” jacket from back in 2018. Is it just another distraction, though?
Musk, Trump, and Kardashian alike have all proven expert at leveraging negative attention into building their personal brand. More importantly, in recent years, numerous chaotic and uncoordinated calls for boycotts and protests have left deep cynicism about their longterm effectiveness.
But the immense wave of revulsion around all things Tesla may be different, potentially at least. Firstly, because Musk’s alliance with Trump really is unprecedented as a fusion of corporate and political power—the connection of protesting Tesla to protesting the new administration’s actions is direct and visceral.
Secondly, the affluent liberals whom Musk now demonizes on X/Twitter were the core audience for Musk’s luxury EVs, and he’s now turned the brand into a divisive symbol. The Tesla brand was cool and even fashionable at a certain point; the reaction to the Kardashian shoot underlines that it is neither now—and not just uncool either, but toxic to be associated with.
But thirdly and most importantly, the backlash is different because it is strategic. Tesla really is vulnerable. Analysts have long said it is extremely overvalued. The cult-like valuation of Tesla stock, which is the core of Musk’s personal wealth, is in large part due to the Elon Musk’s cultural image as some kind of Tony Stark-style genius. And that inflated value has floated all his other ambitions, including his takeover of Twitter itself.
When the Kardashian/Klein photoshoot was shot in November, the euphoria of Musk’s role in Trump’s election was sending Tesla stock surging to new heights. Since then, it has plummeted as the extreme unpopularity of Musk’s vision for America sank in. “We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” one JPMorgan analyst said last week.
And yet, even after the recent nine-week fall in its stock, Tesla trades at multiples of any other car company or even of tech companies like Apple or Amazon (on a price-to-earnings basis). So, yes, social media rage is fleeting and impressionable and not to be taken too seriously. But some part of Musk’s power is based on social-media feedback loops in the first place, and that can go wrong—and maybe the sheer dystopian dreadfulness of the image of Kim Kardashian joylessly taking a selfie with Musk’s robot is a fitting symbol.
