Cartoonist Scott Adams poses together with his a life-size cutout of his creation, Dilbert, in 2014.
Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Photos
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Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Photos
Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered company tradition, has died at age 68, He introduced in Could 2025 that he had metastatic prostate most cancers and solely months to reside.
Months later, in November, Adams took to X to request — and obtain — some very public assist from President Trump and Well being and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in addressing medical insurance points that had delayed his remedy with an FDA-approved most cancers drug referred to as Pluvicto.
Adams mentioned he was in a position to e book an appointment the subsequent day. Regardless of the Trump administration’s public intervention, Adams shared on his YouTube present in early January 2026 that “the chances of me recovering are primarily zero.”
Adams’ former spouse, Shelly Miles, introduced his dying Tuesday throughout a YouTube livestream, after which learn a press release from Adams who mentioned, “I had a tremendous life. I gave it the whole lot I had. For those who received any advantages from my life, I ask you pay it ahead as greatest you may.”
Adams rose to fame within the early Nineties together with his caricature Dilbert, satirizing white-collar tradition based mostly on his personal experiences working in firm places of work. He made headlines once more within the last years of his life for controversial feedback about race, gender and different subjects, which led to Dilbert‘s widespread cancellation in 2023.
Dilbert, which at its peak was syndicated in some 2,000 newspapers throughout 65 nations, spawned quite a few books, a online game and two seasons of an animated sitcom.
“I believe you must be basically irrational to suppose which you could earn a living as a cartoonist, and so I can by no means reply succinctly why it’s that I assumed this may work,” Adams instructed NPR’s Weekend Version in 1996. “It was about the identical value as shopping for a lottery ticket and about the identical odds of succeeding. And I purchase a lottery ticket, so why not?”
He mentioned that he had “just about at all times wished to be a well-known cartoonist,” even making use of to the Well-known Artists Faculty, a correspondence artwork course, as a pre-teen.
“I used to be 11 years outdated, and I might stuffed out the applying saying that I wished to be a cartoonist,” he mentioned. “It seems, as they defined of their rejection letter, that you must be at the least 12 years outdated to be a well-known cartoonist.”
Turning to extra sensible issues, Adams studied economics at Hartwick School in Oneonta, N.Y. and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He additionally educated as a hypnotist on the Clement Faculty of Hypnosis within the Eighties.
Adams started his profession at Crocker Nationwide Financial institution, working what he described in a weblog put up as a “variety of humiliating and low paying jobs: teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), laptop programmer, monetary analyst, product supervisor, and industrial lender.”
He then spent almost a decade working at Pacific Bell — the California phone firm now owned by AT&T — in varied jobs “that defy description however all contain know-how and funds,” as Adams put it in his biography. It was there that he began drawing Dilbert, engaged on the strip on mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 till 1995.
“You get actual cynical for those who spend greater than 5 minutes in a cubicle,” he instructed NPR’s Weekend Version in 2002. “However I actually at all times deliberate that I might escape sometime, as quickly as I received escape velocity.”
Adams satirized company tradition for many years
Scott Adams works on his caricature in his California studio in 2006. He introduced in Could that he was dying of metastatic prostate most cancers.
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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
Dilbert revolves round its eponymous white-collar engineer as he navigates his firm’s comically dysfunctional forms, alongside his sidekick: an anthropomorphized, megalomaniac canine named Dogbert.
“Dilbert is a composite of my co-workers through the years,” Adams wrote on his web site. “He emerged as the principle character of my doodles. I began utilizing him for enterprise shows and received nice responses … Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have somebody to speak to.”
Dilbert — together with his trademark curly head, spherical glasses and always-upturned purple and black tie — fights a relentless battle for his sanity amidst a micromanaged, largely illogical company setting stuffed with pointless conferences, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords and an out-of-touch supervisor recognized solely as Pointy-haired Boss.
Even after Adams stop his day job, he stored a agency grasp on the absurdities and mundanities of cubicle life with assist from his devoted viewers.
He included his e-mail deal with on the strip and mentioned he received lots of of messages every day. Recurring reader options ranged from stolen fridge lunches to bosses’ unrealistic expectations.
“So all of them, for instance, say, ‘I want this report in per week, however make it possible for I get it two weeks early so I might take a look at it,'” Adams mentioned. “Simply weird tales the place it is clear that they both have by no means owned a watch or a calendar or they’re in some form of a time warp.”
Dilbert‘s storylines developed alongside workplace tradition, taking goal at a rising vary of societal and technological subjects through the years. In 2022, Adams launched Dave, the strip’s first Black character, who identifies as white — a alternative critics interpreted as poking enjoyable at DEI initiatives.
That ushered in an period of anti-woke plotlines that noticed dozens of U.S. newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation only a yr later.
The caricature was cancelled over Adams’ feedback
Adams did not restrict himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he referred to as the “expertise stack,” combining a number of frequent abilities in a novel and worthwhile method: like drawing, humor and danger tolerance, in his case.
He ventured briefly into meals retail on the flip of the millennium, promoting vegetarian, microwavable burritos referred to as Dilberitos. He printed a number of novels and nonfiction books unrelated to the Dilbert universe through the years.
Adams was open about his well being struggles all through his profession, together with the motion dysfunction focal dystonia — which significantly affected his drawing hand — and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary clenching of the vocal cords that he managed to remedy via an experimental surgical procedure.
And he opined on social and political occasions on “Actual Espresso with Scott Adams,” his YouTube speak collection with over 180,000 subscribers.
His commentary, which regularly touched on race and different hot-button points, led to Dilbert‘s widespread cancellation in February 2023.
In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — whereas discussing a Rasmussen public opinion ballot asking readers whether or not they agree “It is OK to be white” (which is taken into account an alt-right slogan) — urged white individuals to “get the hell away from Black individuals,” labeling them a “hate group.” The backlash was swift: Dozens of newspapers throughout the nation ditched Dilbert, and the comedian’s distributor dropped Adams.
The incident additionally renewed give attention to quite a few controversial feedback Adams had made previously, together with about race, males’s rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole, and later mentioned getting “canceled” had improved his life, with public help coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.
Adams, in his last years, was a vocal supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.
However he prolonged his “respect and compassion” to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden’s prostate most cancers analysis grew to become public in Could 2025.
The prognosis was private for Adams: He shared that he too had metastatic prostate most cancers and solely months to reside, saying he anticipated “to be testing from this area someday this summer season.”
“I’ve simply type of processed it, so it simply type of is what it’s,” he mentioned on his YouTube present. “All people has to die, so far as I do know.”
