Scott Adams, whose comic strip 'Dilbert' ridiculed white-collar office
life, dies at 68
[January 14, 2026]
By MARK KENNEDY
Scott Adams, whose popular comic strip “Dilbert” captured the
frustration of beleaguered, white-collar cubicle workers and satirized
the ridiculousness of modern office culture until he was abruptly
dropped from syndication in 2023 for racist remarks, has died. He was
68.
His first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, announced the death Tuesday on a
livestream posted on Adams’ social media accounts. “He’s not with us
right anymore,” she said. Adams revealed in 2025 that he had prostate
cancer that had spread to his bones. Miles had said he was in hospice
care in his Northern California home on Monday.
“I had an amazing life,” the statement said in part. “I gave it
everything I had.”
At its height, “Dilbert,” with its mouthless, bespectacled hero in a
white short-sleeved shirt and a perpetually curled red tie, appeared in
2,000 newspapers worldwide in at least 70 countries and 25 languages.
Adams was the 1997 recipient of the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben
Award, considered one of the most prestigious awards for cartoonists.
That same year, “Dilbert” became the first fictional character to make
Time magazine’s list of the most influential Americans.
“We are rooting for him because he is our mouthpiece for the lessons we
have accumulated — but are too afraid to express — in our effort to
avoid cubicular homicide,” the magazine said.
“Dilbert” strips were routinely photocopied, pinned up, emailed and
posted online, a popularity that would spawn bestselling books,
merchandise, commercials for Office Depot and an animated TV series,
with Daniel Stern voicing Dilbert.
The collapse of ‘Dilbert’ empire
It all collapsed quickly in 2023 when Adams, who was white, repeatedly
referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and said he would
no longer “help Black Americans.” He later said he was being hyperbolic,
yet continued to defend his stance.
Almost immediately, newspapers dropped “Dilbert” and his distributor,
Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with the cartoonist. The Sun
Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts, decided to keep the “Dilbert”
space blank for a while “as a reminder of the racism that pervades our
society.” A planned book was scrapped.
“He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of
expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, the creator of the strip “On the
Fastrack,” told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support
with him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the
consequences of saying them.”
Adams relaunched the same daily comic strip under the name Dilbert
Reborn via the video platform Rumble, popular with conservatives and
far-right groups. He also hosted a podcast, “Real Coffee,” where talked
about various political and social issues.
After Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show on ABC was suspended in September
in the wake of the host’s comments on the murder of conservative
activist Charlie Kirk, Adams stood for free speech.
“Would I like some revenge?” Adams said. “Yes. Yes, I would enjoy that.
But that doesn’t mean I get it. That doesn’t mean I should pursue it.
Doesn’t mean the world’s a better place if it happens.”
How ‘Dilbert’ got its start
Adams, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Hartwick College and an MBA
from the University of California, Berkeley, was working a corporate job
at the Pacific Bell telephone company in the 1980s, sharing his cartoons
to amuse co-workers. He drew Dilbert as a computer programmer and
engineer for a high-tech company and mailed a batch to cartoon
syndicators.
“The take on office life was new and on target and insightful,” Sarah
Gillespie, who helped discover “Dilbert” in the 1980s at United Media,
told The Washington Post. “I looked first for humor and only secondarily
for art, which with ‘Dilbert’ was a good thing, as the art is
universally acknowledged to be… not great.”
The first “Dilbert” comic strip officially appeared April 16, 1989, long
before such workplace comedies as “Office Space” and “The Office.” It
portrayed corporate culture as a “Severance”-like, Kafkaesque world of
heavy bureaucracy and pointless benchmarks, where employee effort and
skill were underappreciated.
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Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, poses for a
portrait with the Dilbert character in his studio in Dublin, Calif.,
Oct. 26, 2006. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
 The strip would introduce the
“Dilbert Principle”: The most ineffective workers will be
systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage
— management.
“Throughout history, there have always been times when it’s very
clear that the managers have all the power and the workers have
none,” Adams told Time. “Through ‘Dilbert,’ I would think the
balance of power has slightly changed.”
Other strip characters included Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss; Asok,
a young, naive intern; Wally, a middle-aged slacker; and Alice, a
worker so frustrated that she was prone to frequent outbursts of
rage. Then there was Dilbert’s pet, Dogbert, a megalomaniac.
“There’s a certain amount of anger you need to draw ‘Dilbert’
comics,” Adams told the Contra Costa Times in 2009.
In 1993, Adams became the first syndicated cartoonist to include his
email address in his strip. That triggered a dialogue between the
artist and his fans, giving Adams a fountain of ideas for the strip.
“Dilbert” was also known for generating aphorisms, like “All rumors
are true — especially if your boss denies them” and “OK, let’s get
this preliminary pre-meeting going.”
“If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by
idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will
dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense
of others,” Adams wrote in his 1996 book “The Dilbert Principle.”
In one real-life case, an Iowa worker was fired from the Catfish
Bend Casino in 2007 for posting a “Dilbert” comic strip on the
office bulletin board. In the strip, Adams wrote: “Why does it seem
as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken
lemurs?” A judge later sided with the worker; Adams helped find him
a new job.
A gradual darkening
While Adams’ career fall seemed swift, careful readers of “Dilbert”
saw a gradual darkening of the strip’s tone and its creator’s
descent into misogyny, anti-immigration and racism.
He attracted attention for controversial comments, including saying
in 2011 that women are treated differently by society for the same
reason as children and the mentally disabled — “it’s just easier
this way for everyone.” In a blog post from 2006, he questioned the
death toll of the Holocaust.
In June 2020, Adams tweeted that when the “Dilbert” TV show ended in
2000 after just two seasons, it was “the third job I lost for being
white.” But, at the time, he blamed it on lower viewership and time
slot changes.
Adams’ beliefs began bleeding into his strips. In one in 2022, a
boss says that traditional performance reviews would be replaced by
a “wokeness” score. When an employee complains that could be
subjective, the boss said, “That’ll cost you two points off your
wokeness score, bigot.”
Adams put a brave face on his fall from grace, tweeting in 2023:
“Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for
out-of-context news of course). Social media and banking unaffected.
Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero
pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting
me.”
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump remembered Adams as a “Great
Influencer.”
“He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t
fashionable to do so. He bravely fought a long battle against a
terrible disease,” the president posted on his social media platform
Truth Social.
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