Scott Adams, the creator of the favored caricature “Dilbert,” has died, in line with an announcement on his social media pages.
Adams, who was 68, announced in May that he’d been identified with an aggressive type of prostate most cancers.
“Dilbert,” a chronicle of the indignities of American workplace work, was one of many nation’s most generally learn comedian strips from its breakout success within the Nineteen Nineties till February 2023, when Adams made racist comments towards Black Americans, calling them a “hate group” that white folks ought to “get the hell away from,” in response to a doubtful ballot about whether or not it’s “OK to be white.” Hundreds of newspapers stopped carrying “Dilbert” inside days, and the strip was quickly dropped by its distributor.
Adams, additionally a longtime outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump, started self-publishing the strip, in a “spicier version” referred to as “Dilbert Reborn,” on his web site for a subscription price. He stopped personally drawing “Dilbert” in November 2025 because of cramping and partial paralysis in his arms, he said, although he continued to write down scripts and have them illustrated for him.
Adams’ ex-wife Shelly Miles introduced his loss of life on Tuesday’s episode of the livestream “Coffee with Scott Adams,” which he hosted every day till his loss of life, with a written assertion from Adams.
“I had an amazing life,” Scott Adams wrote within the assertion, composed on New Year’s Day. “I gave it everything I had. If I get any benefits from my work, I’m asking that you pay it forward as best as you can. That’s the legacy I want. Be useful, and please know, I loved you all to the very end.”
Adams, a New York native, labored as a financial institution teller from 1979 till 1986, the identical 12 months he graduated with an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. (He was twice held at gunpoint as a teller, he wrote within the 20-year retrospective “Dilbert 2.0.”) He debuted “Dilbert” in 1989 whereas working as an engineer on the phone firm Pacific Bell, whose sterile setting and zany staff impressed his strip.
“For the future of ‘Dilbert,’ you could say that the group I was in was a target-rich environment,” he told EE Times, an electronics business publication, in 2005.
“Dilbert” didn’t develop into a success till a number of years into its run, when Adams began to set most of its strips in his bespectacled workplace drone’s office. “It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but it worked,” he instructed the Associated Press when he received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben award for the perfect caricature of 1997.
He credited Dilbert’s blankness — his absence of seen eyes, for one, but in addition the shortage of any particulars about his location or function at his firm — with making the strip so standard.
“People have no reason to think it’s not just like their experience,” Adams instructed EE Times. “For instance, there are both engineers and programmers who are convinced Dilbert is one of them.”
And for many years, “Dilbert” was. Readers acknowledged their very own upward-failing managers in Dilbert’s clueless “pointy-haired boss,” or recognized with the everyman hero’s dropping battle towards incompetence in conferences together with his dim coworkers. Adams included his electronic mail deal with in strips for years to collect tales from readers struggling in their very own places of work, materials that “keeps me going,” he told the New Yorker in 2008.
Following the success of the strip, Adams felt unstoppable: “For a while, everything I touched turned to gold,” he instructed Bloomberg in 2017.
Confident in his capacity to promote absolutely anything, he entered the meals enterprise, with a lot much less success. In 1997, he opened a restaurant close to his California house referred to as Stacey’s Cafe. He ultimately took over as boss at its sister location, the place staff described him to the New York Times as “dramatically clueless about the harsh realities of the restaurant industry,” regardless of his years satirizing oblivious bosses. Both Stacey’s areas went “belly-up” someday earlier than 2017, Bloomberg reported.
He was additionally briefly the purveyor of the “Dilberito,” a frozen vegetarian burrito named for his cartoon and marketed as a nutrient-packed various to unhealthy microwavable meals. (The AV Club in 2020 remembered the product as “stomach-ruining.”) The Dilberito, launched in 1999, was discontinued in 2003. Adams instructed the New Yorker a number of years later that “the world wasn’t interested in being healthy, so I got out of that business eventually.”
Adams began to develop into higher recognized for his conservative politics when he started praising President Donald Trump in 2015, accurately predicting forward of the 2016 election that Trump would win. Adams, who described himself as a “trained hypnotist,” mentioned he discovered similarities between the persuasive strategies of hypnosis and Trump’s rhetorical model.
He started running a blog about Trump virtually every day following the candidate’s 2015 debate towards Hillary Clinton, and the brand new topic helped enhance his readership, social media following (the place he had a prolific presence up till his loss of life) and TV information appearances.
“I could go on for pages about how Trump has good-but-not-world-class skills in a variety of areas,” he wrote on a now-defunct Dilbert weblog, per Bloomberg. “And when you put all of those talents together it makes him the most persuasive human I have ever observed.”
His outspoken help for the president led to an invite to the White House following Trump’s 2016 victory. The pair stayed in contact: In November, he publicly pleaded with the president for entry to a brand new most cancers therapy. Trump responded “on it.” Adams posted that he was scheduled to obtain the drug two days after making the request, and he credited the Trump administration.
Adams started calling himself a “disgraced and canceled cartoonist” after “Dilbert” was pulled from syndication in 2023. His beliefs about race, although, had been seen properly earlier than that: In the 2005 EE Times interview, he mentioned he “actually was told that as a Caucasian male, I had no future with the company,” referring to Pacific Bell, which he left in 1995, a number of years after “Dilbert” debuted. He additionally wrote in “Dilbert 2.0” that the animated sequence based mostly on his comedian was canceled after two seasons as a result of “the network made a strategic decision to focus on shows with African-American actors.”
In a publish on Truth Social, Trump remembered Adams as “The Great Influencer” and shared a photograph of Adams’ go to to the Oval Office.
“He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so,” the president wrote.