‘Dilbert’ Comic Creator Scott Adams Dead at 68

Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams has died less than a year after announcing his cancer diagnosis. He was 68.

Adams’ death was announced Tuesday by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, on Real Coffee With Scott Adams. Reading a statement written by the late cartoonist before his death, Miles said, “Things did not go well for me … my body fell before my brain.”

Adams had announced on his podcast in May that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to his bones and paralyzed him below the waist. “I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer,” he said at the time.

Adams’ days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer inspired the corporate comedy of Dilbert, which premiered in 1989 and would go on to appear in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries worldwide. Adams’ characters also briefly appeared in an animated UPN series for two seasons starting in 1999.

Despite the initial success of Dilbert, Adams’ problematic comments would be the comic’s downfall. After making comments disputing the facts of the Holocaust and mocking DEI in the workplace in his comic strips, the final straw for many came in February 2023, when Adams said in a YouTube livestream that “Black people” were a hate group and that advised white people should “get the f— away” from them.

Newspapers were quick to drop Dilbert, with the comic’s distributor cutting ties with Adams and the Penguin Random House imprint Portfolio announcing that it would not publish his next book.

In March 2023, Adams announced he would relaunch his comic strip as Dilbert Reborn under a subscription model, addressing his fall from grace on his website.

“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,” he continued. “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.)”

Adams was married to Miles from 2006 to 2014 and to Kristina Basham from 2020 until 2024. He had no children.