‘Dilbert’ cartoonist Scott Adams dies : NPR

Cartoonist Scott Adams poses with a life-size cutout of his creation, Dilbert, in 2014.

Léa Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

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Léa Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who befuddled corporate culture, has died at 68. He announced in May 2025 that he was suffering from metastatic prostate cancer and had only months to live.

A few months later, in November, Adams went to

Adams said he was able to make an appointment the next day. Despite the Trump administration’s public intervention, Adams said on his YouTube show in early January 2026 that “the chances of me recovering are essentially zero.”

Adams’ former wife, Shelly Miles, announced his death Tuesday during a YouTube livestream, then read a statement from Adams that said: “I had an incredible life. I gave everything I had. If you have benefited from my life, I ask that you pay it forward the best you can.”

Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbertsatirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in corporate offices. He made headlines again in the last years of his life for his controversial comments on race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbertwidespread cancellation in 2023.

Dilbertwhich at its peak was carried in some 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries, spawned a number of books, a video game and two seasons of an animated sitcom.

“I think you have to be fundamentally irrational to think you can make money as a cartoonist, and so I can never succinctly answer why I thought it would work,” Adams told NPR. Weekend Edition in 1996. “It was about the same price as buying a lottery ticket and about the same chance of success. And I’m buying a lottery ticket, so why not?”

He said he had “almost always wanted to be a famous cartoonist,” and even applied to the Famous Artists School, a correspondence art course, when he was a preteen.

“I was 11 years old and I filled out a form saying I wanted to be a cartoonist,” he said. “It turns out, as they explain in their rejection letter, that you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous cartoonist.”

Moving on to more practical matters, Adams studied economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also trained as a hypnotist at the Clément School of Hypnosis in the 1980s.

Adams began his career at Crocker National Bank, working in what he described in a blog post as “a number of humiliating, low-paying jobs: teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, and commercial lender.”

He then spent nearly a decade working at Pacific Bell – the California telephone company now owned by AT&T – in various jobs “that defy description but all involve technology and finance,” as Adams puts it in his biography. This is where he started drawing Dilbertworking on the strip mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 to 1995.

“You get really cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a booth,” he told NPR. Weekend Edition in 2002. “But I certainly always planned to escape one day, as soon as I had escape velocity.”

Adams has satirized corporate culture for decades

Scott Adams works on his comic strip at his California studio in 2006. He announced in May that he was dying of metastatic prostate cancer.

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Dilbert revolves around its eponymous white-collar engineer as he navigates his company’s comically dysfunctional bureaucracy, alongside his sidekick: an anthropomorphized, megalomaniac dog named Dogbert.

“Dilbert is a mix of my colleagues over the years,” Adams wrote on his website. “He became the main character in my doodles. I started using him for professional presentations and got great responses… Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have someone to talk to.”

Dilbert—with his curly head, round glasses, and red-and-black tie always turned inside out—fages a constant battle for his sanity amid a micromanaged and largely illogical corporate environment full of pointless meetings, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords, and an out-of-touch manager known only as the Pointy-Haired Boss.

Even after Adams left his day job, he maintained a firm grasp on the absurdities and banalities of cubicle life with the help of his devoted audience.

He included his email address on the strip and said he received hundreds of messages every day. Readers’ recurring suggestions ranged from stolen lunches from the refrigerator to unrealistic expectations from bosses.

“So, for example, they all say, ‘I need this report in a week, but make sure you get it two weeks in advance so I can look at it,'” Adams said. “Just weird stories where it’s clear they’ve never owned a watch or a calendar or they’re in some sort of time warp.”

Dilbert‘s storylines have evolved alongside office culture, tackling a growing range of societal and technological topics over the years. In 2022, Adams introduced Dave, the strip’s first black character, who identifies as white – a choice that critics interpreted as mocking DEI initiatives.

It marked the start of an era of anti-woke intrigue that saw dozens of American newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation just a year later.

The comic was canceled following Adams’ comments

Adams didn’t limit himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he called the “talent stack,” combining several common skills in a unique and valuable way: like drawing, humor, and risk tolerance, in his case.

He briefly ventured into food retailing around the turn of the millennium, selling microwaveable vegetarian burritos called Dilberitos. He has published several novels and non-fiction books unrelated to the Dilbert the universe over the years.

Adams spoke openly about his health problems throughout his career, including focal dystonia, a movement disorder – which particularly affected his drawing hand – and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary tightening of the vocal cords that he managed to cure through experimental surgery.

And he has opined on social and political events on “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” his YouTube discussion series with more than 180,000 subscribers.

His comments, which often addressed race and other hot-button issues, led to DilbertThe widespread cancellation of in February 2023.

In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — while discussing a Rasmussen public opinion poll asking readers if they agreed with “It’s OK to be white” (which is considered a far-right slogan) — urged white people to “get away from black people,” calling them a “hate group.” The reaction was swift: dozens of newspapers across the country dropped out Dilbertand the comic’s distributor dropped Adams.

The incident also brought renewed attention to many controversial comments Adams had made in the past, including on race, men’s rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his comments as hyperbole, and later said that being “canceled” had improved his life, with public support coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.

Adams, in his later years, was a strong supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.

But he expressed his “respect and compassion” to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis was made public in May 2025.

The prognosis was personal for Adams: He shared that he too was suffering from metastatic prostate cancer and had only months to live, saying he expected to “leave this field this summer.”

“I just kind of processed it, so it kind of is what it is,” he said on his YouTube show. “As far as I know, everyone must die.”