Scott Adams, Creator of the Dilbert Comic Strip, Dies at 68

Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, before racist remarks got him pink-slipped, died Tuesday. He was 68.

His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife,Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. “I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer,” he said.

In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, “Things did not go well for me … my body fell before my brain.”

Sprung from Adams’ days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million.

Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.

“That’s the amazing thing I found when I went online a couple of years ago,” Adams told The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “I heard from all these people who thought that they were the only ones, that they were in this unique, absurd situation. That they couldn’t talk about their situation because no one would believe it. Basically, there are 25 million people out there, living in cardboard boxes indoors, and there was no voice for them. So there was this pent-up demand.”

Dilbert was an unassuming, mild-mannered engineer who was a whiz with computers but lacking in social skills. His colleagues included Alice, a highly qualified tech who raged against the chauvinistic corporate mindset that thought less of her because she was a woman; Wally, a senior engineer whose goal was to avoid work and responsibility at all costs; and Asok, an Indian intern whose optimism was quashed by the corporate agenda.

The team was overseen by the Pointy-Haired Boss, a clueless authority whose actions towed the company line and often caused more harm than good. Also in the mix were Dogbert, a maniacal schemer, and Catbert, the ruthless head of HR.

Many of the jokes played off the inane truths of the work environment. For example, when the Pointy-Haired Boss suggests a pre-meeting to prepare for a meeting the next day, Dilbert sarcastically questions whether it’s wise to jump into a pre-meeting without any planning. In the last panel, the team finds themselves sitting through a preliminary pre-meeting.

In another entry, Catbert bans the term “work-life balance,” as it implies that employees’ lives are important. He goes on to compliment Dilbert for not having a life. And when the boss wonders why his email is not working, Wally tells him the internet is full, leading the boss to attempt to drain the data from his computer by siphoning it into a wastebasket.

Dilbert sprang from the monotony of Adams’ own days on the job. Stuck in endless business meetings, he’d while away the hours sketching ideas on a notepad, leading to Dilbert. “I hated my work,” he said. “It never seemed to me to be what I should be doing.”

Adams put together a portfolio of his workday doodles and sent it to several newspaper syndicates. United Feature Syndicate bit, and by 1991, Adams’ cartooning revenue had far exceeded his annual Pacific Bell salary.

Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons, his first Dilbert compilation book, hit bookstores in 1992. It was followed by 48 more, including Random Acts of Management, When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View? and Freedom’s Just Another Word for People Finding Out You’re Useless. Dilbert T-shirts, calendars, coffee mugs, dolls and a video game flooded the market.

For two seasons starting in 1999, fans could catch animated Dilbert episodes on UPN. Developed by Adams in collaboration with Seinfeld writer Larry Charles, the series featured the voice talent of Daniel Stern (Dilbert), Larry Miller (Pointy-Haired Boss), Chris Elliott (Dogbert), Kathy Griffin (Alice) and Jason Alexander (Catbert).

For several years, Adams kept his day job, and the strips included his email address. He spent mornings before work poring over missives sent via email or posted to Dilboard, an AOL bulletin board. If a tale of workplace misery caught his eye, he’d incorporate it into the strip.

“I’ll probably quit fairly soon, but I couldn’t tell you when,” Adams said during his 1995 Times interview. “You know, the amazing thing is that all of this — the drawing, the speaking, the interviews, the autographs — it feels like breathing, it’s so natural. My old life — no amount of getting used to it would have made it right.”

By the end of that year, Adams had resigned from Pacific Bell to become a full-time cartoonist. That gig, however, would come to a screeching halt.

Over the years, Adams had disputed the death toll of the Holocaust, said ISIS supported Hillary Clinton for president, celebrated those who resisted getting the COVID-19 vaccine, reasoned that society looks upon women in the same way it does children and the intellectually disabled and introduced a Black character to Dilbert to poke fun at DEI in the workplace.

During a February 2023 YouTube livestream, Adams ranted about a conservative-leaning poll that noted 26 percent of Black respondents disagreed with the phrase, “It’s OK to be white,” which the Anti-Defamation League has termed hate speech for its use by white supremacists. He went on to label “Black people” as a hate group.

“As you know, I’ve been identifying as Black for a while — years now — because I like, you know, I like to be on the winning team,” he said. “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away, because there’s no fixing this. You just have to escape, so that’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood where, you know, I have a very low Black population.”

The fallout was swift. Newspapers yanked Dilbert from its pages, distributor Andrews McMeel Universal cut all ties with him, and the Penguin Random House imprint Portfolio said it wouldn’t publish his next book.

In March 2023, Adams announced he was reintroducing the comic strip with a spicier version he called Dilbert Reborn. He made it available via subscription through X.com and Scottadams.locals.com. At Dilbert.com, he offered an unabashed version of his fall from grace.

“If you believe the news, it was because I am a big ol’ racist,” Adams wrote. “Context: No news about public figures is ever true and in context. Never. If you look into the context, the point that got me canceled is that CRT, DEI and ESG all have in common the framing that White Americans are historically the oppressors and Black Americans have been oppressed, and it continues to this day. I recommended staying away from any group of Americans that identifies your group as the bad guys, because that puts a target on your back. I was speaking hyperbolically, of course, because we Americans don’t have an option of staying away from each other. But it did get a lot of attention, as I hoped. (More than I planned, actually.)”

Scott Raymond Adams was born on June 8, 1957, in Windham, New York. He credited his mother, Virginia, a hobby landscape artist, for his creative instincts and his father, Paul, a postal clerk, for his sense of humor.

Growing up, Adams became a fan of the Peanuts comic strip and decided he wanted to be the next Charles M. Schulz. In a cereal box contest, he sketched Old Faithful and won a camera and an application to the Famous Artist Course for Talented Young People. He said he was crushed when he was turned down because he was too young.

Adams graduated from Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School in 1975. He joked that he was his high school valedictorian because he was the only one in his graduating class of 40 who knew how to spell “valedictorian.” He then enrolled in Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, choosing economics as a major.

In his 2008 book, Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert, Adams revealed he took one art class in college and received the lowest grade. He admitted he deserved it. “The other students were talented artists who could draw a bunch of fruit on a table so well it made you hungry,” he wrote. “My drawings looked like something you see on prison walls.”

With a B.A. in economics, Adams headed to San Francisco, moved in with his brother, David, and found a job as a teller with Crocker National Bank. In the first four months, he was robbed twice at gunpoint, leading him to conclude that management might be safer.

For the next six years, Adams’ job titles included management trainee, computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager and supervisor of a small group of analysts in charge of negotiating contracts, writing business cases and tracking budgets. Adams boasted he was incompetent at every one of them.

Concluding he would need an M.B.A if he wanted to climb the corporate ladder, Adams got into UC Berkeley, with the bank footing the bill. As he closed in on his master’s degree, he learned that an assistant vice president position was opening up but figured he wouldn’t get it because the bank was leaning toward hiring a minority, he said.

Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.

Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.

Adams posted early incarnations of his characters on the whiteboard in his cubicle, and co-workers reacted positively, though they wanted to know the name of the protagonist, the guy with the hair that looked like the tip of a broom and a necktie always pointing upward. Adams started a “Name the Nerd” contest and credited Mike Goodwin, his former boss, with the winning entry.

He came up with a portfolio of 50 sample strips and sent it to the syndicators on a list in the book he had purchased. One day, the phone rang and a representative from United Media, the parent company of United Feature Syndicate, was on the line. The world was going to meet Dilbert.

Adams was married to Miles, whom he met at a health club, from 2006 until their 2014 divorce and to Kristina Basham, a model and baker who was vice president of WhenHub, from 2020 until their 2024 divorce. He had no children.

“I had an amazing life, I gave it everything I had,” he said as his final words in the statement read by Miles. “If I got 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.”