Save Kim Kardashian not long ago appeared on Alabama Barker’s TikTok live. “You have to come over and see my [Birkin] collection,” she said, adding that Guram Gvasalia, the creative director of Vetements, encouraged her to travel to Paris to purchase one of Hermès’s rare Himalayan models. “I gotta show it to you, I got the one with the diamonds.” The bag – which is worth no less than £500,000 on the resale market – is an obscene symbol of wealth and just one of the many ways in which celebrities maintain distance from one another. But such trinkets might no longer be enough: Kim’s latest demonstration of status and connection is even harder to come by – an unreleased humanoid robot developed by Tesla. Yesterday afternoon, she displayed its capabilities in a series of gushing Instagram Stories, speaking to “Optimus” in the same tone reserved for young children who have yet to develop fine motor skills. “You know how to do that!?” Kim coos, making heart hands with the robot. “Oh, you are Hawaiian!” she purrs, when it wafts its hands to the side. “Raise the roof!” she cheers, as it pumps the sky like Elon Musk at one of Donald Trump’s rallies. It is strange: most people seem to be distancing themselves from the distended tycoon, who bankrolled the president-elect’s campaign with a $200million cash injection. Not Kim. Stranger still that these stories are not marked as #ads. X content