Improbable rise, sudden fall and Trumpian reinvention of Dilbert creator Scott Adams, dead at 68: How a cartoon chronicler of office drudgery became a fearless anti-woke warrior
For the second time in four months a bank robber had pulled a gun on him, and Scott Adams realized he needed a new job.
New York born, he had moved to California to 'find luck', he later said. It evidently wasn't shining down on him on the floor of that San Francisco bank.
So Adams moved upstairs into management, taking an MBA at Berkeley and rising through the ranks: management trainee, computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager, and supervisor.
The scramble up the corporate career ladder gave birth to Dilbert - the beloved cartoon character, created by Adams in the late 1980s.
'I had several different bosses during the early years of Dilbert,' Adams told the New Yorker in 2008. 'They were all pretty sure I was mocking someone else.'
Adams, whose death from prostate cancer at the age of 68 was announced on Tuesday, was modest about his ability. But there was no denying his impact.
Dilbert entered the world in 1989, and rapidly became a household name: at its peak, the bespectacled office worker with the white shirt and jaunty tie could be found in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries. The strips were translated into 25 languages. An estimated 150 million readers followed Dilbert’s travails worldwide.
'I’m a poor artist,' he told Forbes magazine in 2013. 'Through brute force I brought myself up to mediocre. I’ve never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.
Adams, poses for a portrait in his home office on January 6, 2014 in Pleasanton, California. His death from prostate cancer at the age of 68 was announced on Tuesday
The scramble up the corporate career ladder gave birth to Dilbert - the beloved cartoon character, created by Adams (pictured here with two Dilbert characters at a party in 1999)
Adams pictured during a livestream on January 1 when he delivered an update of his grim prognosis.He was modest about his ability. But there was no denying his impact
'If I have a party at my house, I’m not the funniest person in the room, but I’m a little bit funny, I can write a little bit, I can draw a little bit, and you put those three together and you’ve got Dilbert, a fairly powerful force.'
Adams credits his father Paul, a postal clerk, for his sense of humor.
'The cynical part of me comes from my dad,' he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1998. 'I don’t know whether he’s had a serious thing to say about anything as long as I’ve known him.'
Born in Windham, a ski town in the Catskills Mountains 140 miles north of New York City, Adams was drawing from the age of five and dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. But he concluded that following his heart was unlikely to pay the rent.
'When you when you reach an age when you understand likelihood and statistics, you lose that innocence that anything is possible,' he told the New York Times in 2003.
Instead, he studied economics in upstate New York, graduating in 1979 from Hartwick College in Oneonta before moving to the Bay Area.
'The first thing I did when I got out of college in my small upstate New York life, is I said, "Where is all the luck?"' he told a Hoover Institute panel in September 2017. 'I was thinking opportunity, but really they're so correlated. I said, "I got to get out of here." I said, California.'
He began work at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco in 1979, but those two robberies soon taught him it was safer on the upstairs floors.
By 1986 he was working at telecoms company Pacific Bell, getting up at 4am to draw for several hours before work, and doodling during the day to while away the boredom of corporate meetings.
Soon his colleagues were passing his musings around the office and faxing them to others. So, he decided to pitch his work to the papers.
'The short version is that I bought a book on how to become a cartoonist and followed the directions on submitting work to the big comic-syndication outfits,' he told the New Yorker. 'I was rejected by all of them but United Media.'
In 1989, United Media, a syndicator who carried Charles Schulz’s ‘Peanuts,’ agreed to publish his work. Dilbert and friends soon became firm favorites across the country, and within a couple of years Adams’s income from the cartoon dwarfed his Pacific Bell salary.
Adams pictured with Dilbert cartoon characters in September 1998. United Media, a syndicator who carried Charles Schulz’s ‘Peanuts,’ agreed to publish his work in 1989
By 1986 Adams (pictured here in 'Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle') was working at telecoms company Pacific Bell, getting up at 4am to draw for several hours before work
He added his email to the cartoons, so people could respond and suggest new storylines.
'I heard from all these people who thought that they were the only ones, that they were in this unique, absurd situation,' he told the New York Times in 1995. '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.'
For years Adams kept his day job, plowing through the drudgery inside the confines of cubicle number 4S700R - in part for the fodder it provided.
'There were days when stuff would happen and I would literally lose control of myself,' he told the New York Times in 1995. 'I'd see the things that I was doing and the things that were going on around me and I'd laugh so hard that tears would come down my cheeks. I would hold myself in the fetal position, just thinking of the absurdity of my situation and that I was getting paid for it.'
Later that same year Adams would leave Pacific Bell and focus full time on creating his comics.
Dilbert made Adams a very rich man: by the time of his death, he is estimated to have earned around $20 million.
He married his first wife, Shelly Miles, in 2006, divorcing eight years later but remaining close friends. He was married to his second wife, Kristina Basham, from 2020 until 2022, and had no children.
His fame also brought controversy.
Adams was open about his interest in Donald Trump as a political figure, describing Trump as a master showman and powerful persuader. Adams saw himself as an 'ultra liberal' socially, but agnostic 'on stuff like international relations, what do we do with trade deals and stuff like that.'
He also gleefully mocked workplace Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, and corporate social goals.
In 2022 he had been dropped by some newspapers for a flurry of Dilbert scenarios taking aim at DEI, with a black worker, who identifies as white, being asked to also identify as gay to boost his company's environmental, social, and governance ratings.
In 2023 he was more widely 'cancelled' for using his podcast, Real Coffee With Scott Adams, to discuss racial attitudes in an off-the-cuff way many found offensive.
While discussing a Rasmussen Reports opinion poll that found that 53 percent of black Americans agreed with the statement, 'It’s OK to be white' he declared: 'If nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people', they are a 'hate group.'
'So far every black person I've talked to has said, "I get what you're saying,"' Scott Adams (right) told Chris Cuomo on News Nation. 'It's almost entirely white people that canceled me'
He was married to his second wife, Kristina Basham, (pictured) from 2020 until 2022, and had no children
Adams added: 'I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.'
The backlash was swift. Adams later admitted it was 'hyperbole', and that he should have chosen his words with more care.
He bounced back, publishing in March 2023 Dilbert Reborn, available via online subscription.
'If you believe the news, it was because I am a big ol’ racist,' he 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.)'
Adams announced his prostate cancer diagnosis in May 2025, saying the disease was aggressive, and he doubted he had long to live.
In November, he wrote on X that his health was 'declining fast,' and appealed to Trump for help in securing a drug that his insurer had approved but not yet given him.
Trump replied: 'On it!'
Adams once described his 'perfect life' as being born selfish as a baby and gradually becoming more giving. 'That was always the life arch that I've pursued,' he said in 2017. 'Start perfectly selfish and on your last day give it all away. Literally you die, your estate is going.
'By then, you should've given all of your wisdom, any kindness you had, anything you could contribute.'
