Maureen Dowd once loved Elon Musk.

In 2017, Dowd, the often-irritating liberal writer for The New York Times, did a profile of Musk. The piece is reproduced in her new book Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech.

Dowd treats Musk like a combination saint, genius, and fecund exemplar of masculinity. Unfortunately, because Dowd wants to remain at the cool kids’ table, Dowd now feels compelled to savage Musk in the introduction to Notorious. In 2025, with President Trump in office and Musk serving as his right hand at DOGE, Dowd looks back on her profile of Elon with bitterness. It’s a shame that Dowd chickened out. Her 2017 profile captures the real Elon Musk. The 2025 MoDo should be proud of it.

In fact, many of the profiles in Notorious are wonderfully written and insightful. When not writing about politics, which always makes her sound smug and sour, Dowd can treat the subjects of her profiles like genuine and complex human beings. (Full disclosure: I have a personal beef with Dowd, but that’s another story.)

Before Donald Trump drove her crazy (as he seems to have done for almost everyone on the left), Dowd was capable of insight and honesty, as well as temperance when it comes to the deployment of her political outrage. In her book, the profiles of people like Sean Penn, Uma Thurmond, and Paul Newman are humane and funny. She calls Penn a “famous Hollywood hothead” and has fun wondering if her photographer is safe, considering Penn’s history of roughing up paparazzi. She notes Paul Newman’s shyness after becoming famous. She rightly sides with Uma Thurmond against her tormentors Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino. Dowd’s profile of Kevin Costner is an incredibly savage, and accurate, takedown, a master class in sitting back and letting an egotist make an ass out of himself.

Then there’s Elon. Dowd positively gushes over Musk. Remember, the profile was written in 2017, before the South African genius had joined forces with the Donald and become kryptonite to the left. 

Just watch Dowd light up:

Elon Musk smiled when I mentioned to him that he comes across as something of an Ayn Rand–ian hero. “I have heard that before,” he said in his slight South African accent. “She obviously has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.” But Ayn Rand would do some re-writes on Elon Musk. She would make his eyes gray and his face more gaunt. She would refashion his public demeanor to be less droll, and she would not countenance his goofy giggle. She would certainly get rid of all his nonsense about the “collective” good. She would find great material in the 45-year-old’s complicated personal life: his first wife, the fantasy writer Justine Musk, and their five sons (one set of twins, one of triplets), and his much younger second wife, the British actress Talulah Riley.

But Modo’s only getting warmed up:

Mostly, Rand would savor Musk, a hyper-logical, risk-loving industrialist. He enjoys costume parties, wing-walking, and Japanese steampunk extravaganzas. Robert Downey Jr. used Musk as a model for Iron Man. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who has gone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him “a cross between Steve Jobs and Jules Verne.” As they danced at their wedding reception, Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” In a tech universe full of skinny guys in hoodies—whipping up chat bots that will chat with you and apps that can study a photo of a dog and tell you what breed it is—Musk is a throwback to Henry Ford and Hank Rearden. In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden gives his wife a bracelet made from the first batch of his revolutionary metal, as though it were made of diamonds. Musk has a chunk of one of his rockets mounted on the wall of his Bel Air house, like a work of art. Musk shoots for the moon—literally.

She’s rolling, don’t stop her:

He creates sleek batteries that could lead to a world powered by cheap solar energy. He forges gleaming steel into sensuous Tesla electric cars with such elegant lines that even the nitpicking Steve Jobs would have been hard-pressed to find fault. He wants to save time as well as humanity: he dreamed up the Hyperloop, an electromagnetic bullet train in a tube, which may one day whoosh travelers between L.A. and San Francisco at 700 miles per hour.

This is beautifully written stuff, evocative of Tom Wolfe. Sadly, in the introduction to Notorious Dowd rejects her former, more enthusiastic self. The Musk profile, she assures readers, was done in 2017, when Elon “was more the quirky visionary, before he commandeered Twitter and transformed into a right-wing crank that embraced racist conspiracies, flirted with antisemites, endorsed and endowed Donald Trump, and devolved into more frequent manifestations of ‘demon mode,’ as Grimes, his former partner and mother of three of his (at least) 12 children, put it.”

Gone is Elon as Iron Man, the visionary inventor and philanthropist out of Ayn Rand. He’s now been replaced by a demon. Nobody expects journalists to have any integrity, but it’s particularly sad when they manifest such obvious talent, as Dowd does, only to burn it on the altar of anti-Trump.