Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, died today of prostate cancer at 68.
Adams satirized the world of cubicle-based IT and engineering in Dilbert, which at its height appeared in 2,000 daily newspapers and was later anthologized in numerous books.
Dilbert was an engineer with few social skills, but he always knew more than his pointy-haired boss, a caricature of terrible supervisors everywhere who managed to make the life of those who actually knew what they were doing—the engineers—much harder than it needed to be.
In his last two decades, Adams shifted increasingly from the world of comics to politics, where he became increasingly vocal—and abrasive—about his conservative views and his support for Donald Trump.
In the final years of his life, these attitudes cost him most of what he had built with Dilbert. For instance, in 2022, as Rolling Stone recounts, “over 75 newspapers dropped Dilbert after Adams introduced the strip’s first Black character, which he then used as a prop to mock ‘wokeness’ (the character identified as white and LGBTQ+ for work purposes).”
The next year, Adams lost far more papers when he offered commentary on a poll finding that just 53 percent of black Americans agreed with the phrase “It’s OK to be white.” (The phrase appears to have originated from alt-right users of 4chan.)
Adams took to his podcast to discuss the poll. The New York Times summed up his remarks:
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people,” [Adams] said on the podcast episode, then they are a “hate group.” He 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.”
This resulted in Dilbert‘s cancellations from most major papers. Adams later insisted on his website that he was not, in fact, a “big ol’ racist” and that he was speaking “hyperbolically, of course, because we Americans don’t have an option of staying away from each other.”
But he did still “recommend staying away from any group of Americans that identifies your group as the bad guys, because that puts a target on your back.”
Adams eventually relaunched the strip as the subscription-only Dilbert Reborn, which he said was “too spicy for the general public.” He focused more on his business and political books, including one on Donald Trump and the importance of “persuasion” over facts. He also spent significant time hosting the “Real Coffee with Scott Adams” community he created online.
Adams appeared on Real Coffee streams even as his health collapsed over the past year and he lost feeling in his legs; he was on a Real Coffee stream just two days ago, looking quite ill but still up for joking with his guests about how dumb liberal women must be to go protest right in front of heavily armed, amped-up police.
In a statement published after his death today—and read aloud on his Real Coffee channel by his ex-wife—Adams spoke little about Dilbert. Instead, he focused on his other books, saying that he had tried hard to be “useful” and encouraging his followers to do likewise.
“I had an amazing life,” Adams concluded. “I gave it everything I had.”
He also noted that many of his friends had encouraged him to “find Jesus before I go.” Despite not being a believer, Adams noted that the “risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive” and so he included a statement claiming to “accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior.”
“The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven,” he added.
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