Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ comic creator, dies
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Scott Adams, the creator of the popular comic strip “Dilbert,” has died, according to an announcement on his social media pages.
Adams announced in May that he’d been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
“Dilbert,” a chronicle of the indignities of American office work, was one of the country’s most popular comic strips from its breakout success in the 1990s until February 2023, when Adams made racist comments against Black Americans, calling them a “hate group” that white people should “get the hell away from,” in response to a dubious poll about whether it’s “OK to be white.” Hundreds of newspapers stopped carrying “Dilbert” within days, and the strip was soon dropped by its distributor.
Adams began self-publishing the strip, a “spicier version” called “Dilbert Reborn,” on his website for a subscription fee. He stopped drawing “Dilbert” in November 2025 due to cramping and partial paralysis in his hands, he said, though he continued to write the strips.
Adams’ ex-wife Shelly Miles announced his death on Tuesday’s episode of the livestream “Coffee with Scott Adams,” which he hosted daily until his death, with a written statement from Adams.
“I had an amazing life,” Scott Adams wrote in the statement, 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, worked as a bank teller from 1979 until 1986, the same year he graduated with an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. (He was twice held at gunpoint as a teller, he wrote in the 20-year retrospective “Dilbert 2.0.”) He debuted “Dilbert” in 1989 while working as an engineer at the telephone company Pacific Bell, whose sterile setting and zany employees inspired 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 industry publication, in 2005.
“Dilbert” didn’t become a hit until a few years into its run, when Adams started to set most of its strips in his bespectacled office drone’s workplace. “It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but it worked,” he told the Associated Press when he won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben award for the best comic strip of 1997.
He credited Dilbert’s blankness — his absence of visible eyes, for one, but also the lack of any particulars about his location or role at his company — with making the strip so popular.
“People have no reason to think it’s not just like their experience,” Adams told EE Times. “For instance, there are both engineers and programmers who are convinced Dilbert is one of them.”
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Scott Adams was a star in the libertarian universe. I'm sorry for his family but his ideology would be and is harmful to this country.
I used to like his cartoons. But I never realized until now what a piece of shit he was