Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Dies Following Cancer Battle

Scott Adams, the creator of the long-running comic strip Dilbert, has died at the age of 68. His death was announced by his ex-wife, Shelly Miles, during a Jan. 13 episode of his Coffee with Scott Adams podcast.

Miles read a final message Adams wrote on Jan. 1, 2026, shortly before his death. “If you are reading this, things did not go well for me,” Adams wrote. “My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this January 1, 2026.”

Adams revealed in May 2025 that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. In January 2026, he said his chances of recovery were “essentially zero,” adding that he had lost feeling in his legs and was experiencing heart failure.

A Career That Defined Office Culture

Adams first published Dilbert in 1989, drawing on his own experience working in corporate America. Born in Windham, New York, in 1957, Adams initially pursued a more traditional career path after being discouraged from becoming a cartoonist. He majored in economics, worked as a bank teller, earned an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and later took a job at Pacific Bell.

Dilbert grew out of doodles Adams made at work, often depicting coworkers as characters with “little potato-shaped bodies” and glasses, as he told PEOPLE. United Media picked up the strip in 1989, but its popularity surged in the 1990s after Adams added his email address to the strip, soliciting ideas from readers.

“Most of the ideas I use are from e-mail,” Adams told PEOPLE in 1995. “It's like tapping into this great collective consciousness.”

By the mid-1990s, Dilbert appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers across 32 countries and became a fixture of office culture. Workers posted the comic in cubicles as a form of quiet rebellion against corporate bureaucracy, which PEOPLE once described as “passive resistance.” Adams quit his corporate job in 1995 to focus on the strip full time.

The franchise expanded into bestselling books, Hallmark cards, a short-lived vegetarian microwave burrito called the Dilberito, and a UPN animated series that ran for two seasons and won a Primetime Emmy Award for its title sequence.

Later Work and Personal Life

Over the years, Adams published dozens of Dilbert collections and nonfiction books, including How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Win Bigly, Loserthink, and Reframe Your Brain. He hosted Coffee with Scott Adams, where he increasingly discussed politics and culture.

Adams was married to Shelly Miles from 2006 to 2014 and became stepfather to her two children. In a 2010 interview, he credited Miles with helping him through spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that left him nearly mute until surgery in 2008. “I felt like a ghost,” Adams said at the time.

He later married Kristina Basham in 2020. They announced their divorce in 2022.

Racist Remarks and Public Fallout

Adams’ career took a dramatic turn in 2023 after a YouTube broadcast in which he made racist remarks about Black Americans while discussing a Rasmussen poll that found 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement "It's okay to be White." During the episode, Adams advised White people to “get the hell away from Black people” and described Black Americans as a “hate group.”

The comments sparked widespread condemnation. Numerous newspapers dropped Dilbert, and its distributor severed ties with Adams. While he continued publishing the comic online, the strip was effectively removed from mainstream circulation.

In his final message, Adams reflected on his life and legacy. “I had an amazing life,” Miles read. “If I got any benefits from my work, I'm asking that you pay it forward, as best as you can. That’s the legacy I want. Be useful and please know I loved you all to the very end.”

A Complicated Legacy

Scott Adams leaves behind a body of work that once sharply captured the frustrations of modern office life, alongside a final chapter marked by controversy and public rejection. His influence on workplace satire remains undeniable, even as his later remarks permanently altered how his legacy is viewed.

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