Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered corporate culture, has died at age 68, He announced in May 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live.
Months later, in November, Adams took to X to request — and receive — some very public help from President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in addressing health insurance issues that had delayed his treatment with an FDA-approved cancer drug called Pluvicto.
Adams said he was able to book an appointment the next day. Despite the Trump administration's public intervention, Adams shared on his YouTube show in early January 2026 that "the odds of me recovering are essentially zero."
Adams' former wife, Shelly Miles, announced his death Tuesday during a YouTube livestream, and then read a statement from Adams who said, "I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my life, I ask you pay it forward as best you can."
Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, satirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in company offices. He made headlines again in the final years of his life for controversial comments about race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbert's widespread cancellation in 2023.
Dilbert, which at its height was syndicated in some 2,000 newspapers across 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 that you can make money as a cartoonist, and so I can never answer succinctly why it is that I thought this would work," Adams told NPR's Weekend Edition in 1996. "It was about the same cost as buying a lottery ticket and about the same odds of succeeding. And I buy a lottery ticket, so why not?"
He said that he had "pretty much always wanted to be a famous cartoonist," even applying to the Famous Artists School, a correspondence art course, as a pre-teen.
"I was 11 years old, and I'd filled out the application saying that I wanted to be a cartoonist," he said. "It turns out, as they explained in their rejection letter, that you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous cartoonist."
Turning to more practical matters, Adams studied economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also trained as a hypnotist at the Clement School of Hypnosis in the 1980s.
Adams began his career at Crocker National Bank, working what he described in a blog post as a "number of humiliating and 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 finances," as Adams put it in his biography. It was there that he started drawing Dilbert, working on the strip on mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 until 1995.
"You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle," he told NPR's Weekend Edition in 2002. "But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday, as soon as I got escape velocity."
Adams satirized corporate culture for decades
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 composite of my co-workers over the years," Adams wrote on his website. "He emerged as the main character of my doodles. I started using him for business presentations and got great responses … Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have someone to talk to."
Dilbert — with his trademark curly head, round glasses and always-upturned red and black tie — fights a constant battle for his sanity amidst a micromanaged, largely illogical corporate environment full of pointless meetings, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords and an out-of-touch manager known only as Pointy-haired Boss.
Even after Adams quit his day job, he kept a firm grasp on the absurdities and mundanities of cubicle life with help from his devoted audience.
He included his email address on the strip and said he got hundreds of messages each day. Recurring reader suggestions ranged from stolen refrigerator lunches to bosses' unrealistic expectations.
"So they all, for example, say, 'I need this report in a week, but make sure that I get it two weeks early so I could look at it,'" Adams said. "Just bizarre stories where it's clear that they either have never owned a watch or a calendar or they are in some kind of a time warp."
Dilbert's storylines evolved alongside office culture, taking aim at 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 critics interpreted as poking fun at DEI initiatives.
That ushered in an era of anti-woke plotlines that saw dozens of U.S. newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation just a year later.
The comic strip was cancelled over Adams' comments
Adams didn't limit himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he called the "talent stack," combining multiple common skills in a unique and valuable way: like drawing, humor and risk tolerance, in his case.
He ventured briefly into food retail at the turn of the millennium, selling vegetarian, microwavable burritos called Dilberitos. He published several novels and nonfiction books unrelated to the Dilbert universe over the years.
Adams was open about his health struggles throughout his career, including the movement disorder focal dystonia — which particularly affected his drawing hand — and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary clenching of the vocal cords that he managed to cure through an experimental surgery.
And he opined on social and political events on "Real Coffee with Scott Adams," his YouTube talk series with over 180,000 subscribers.
His commentary, which often touched on race and other hot-button issues, led to Dilbert's widespread cancellation in February 2023.
In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — while discussing a Rasmussen public opinion poll asking readers whether they agree "It's OK to be white" (which is considered an alt-right slogan) — urged white people to "get the hell away from Black people," labeling them a "hate group." The backlash was swift: Dozens of newspapers across the country ditched Dilbert, and the comic's distributor dropped Adams.
The incident also renewed focus on numerous controversial comments Adams had made in the past, including about race, men's rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole, and later said getting "canceled" had improved his life, with public support coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.
Adams, in his final years, was a vocal supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.
But he extended his "respect and compassion" to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis became public in May 2025.
The prognosis was personal for Adams: He shared that he too had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live, saying he expected "to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer."
"I've just sort of processed it, so it just sort of is what it is," he said on his YouTube show. "Everybody has to die, as far as I know."
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