Scott Adams, the creator of the favored sketch “Dilbert,” has died, based on an announcement on his social media pages.
Adams 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 Nineties till February 2023, when Adams made racist comments in opposition to 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 started self-publishing the strip, in a “spicier version” referred to as “Dilbert Reborn,” on his web site for a subscription payment. He stopped drawing “Dilbert” in November 2025 attributable to cramping and partial paralysis in his fingers, he said, although he continued to write down the strips.
Adams’ ex-wife Shelly Miles introduced his dying on Tuesday’s episode of the livestream “Coffee with Scott Adams,” which he hosted each day till his dying, 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 yr 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 workers 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 change into a success till a couple 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 informed the Associated Press when he gained the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben award for the very best sketch 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 position at his firm — with making the strip so common.
“People have no reason to think it’s not just like their experience,” Adams informed 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 in opposition to incompetence in conferences along with his dim coworkers. Adams included his e mail deal with in strips for years to collect tales from readers struggling in their very own workplaces, 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 informed Bloomberg in 2017.
Confident in his means 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 workers described him to the New York Times as “dramatically clueless about the harsh realities of the restaurant industry,” regardless of his a few years satirizing oblivious bosses. Both Stacey’s areas went “belly-up” someday earlier than 2017, per Bloomberg.
He was additionally briefly the purveyor of the “Dilberito,” a frozen vegetarian burrito named for his cartoon and marketed as a nutrient-packed different 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 informed the New Yorker a couple of years later that “the world wasn’t interested in being healthy, so I got out of that business eventually.”
This story is creating and can be up to date.