Scott Adams, the cartoonist who made millions of cubicle workers feel seen with his comic strip "Dilbert," died Monday at age 68. He'd been battling metastatic prostate cancer for months, and in his final days, he knew the end was coming.
"Unfortunately, this isn't good news," his ex-wife Shelly Miles told fans on YouTube Tuesday. "He's not with us anymore." Just one day before his death, Adams had been honest with his followers. "I'm way past my expiration date," he said in an online chat. "My tiredness and my pain are maxing out. I'm in quite bad shape of the bones."
The Man Who Made Us Laugh at Work For over three decades, "Dilbert" was the comic strip that got it. The pointy-haired boss. The soul-crushing meetings. The ridiculous corporate jargon. Adams turned all the absurdity of office life into something we could laugh about. He created Dilbert in 1989 while working at Pacific Bell. Mornings, evenings, weekends he drew the strip whenever he could steal time from his day job. "You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle," Adams once said. "But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday." And escape he did. By 1995, "Dilbert" was syndicated in over 400 newspapers. In 1997, Adams won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award. He was in the same league as Matt Groening, Gary Trudeau, and Charles Schulz. The comic even got its own TV show in 1999. Adams left Pacific Bell to draw full-time. He'd made it. Everything he touched turned to gold.
The Fall From Grace But Scott Adams in 2026 looked nothing like Scott Adams in 1997. The man who once united office workers became deeply divisive. Controversial. Canceled. It started slowly. Comments here and there. In 2006, he questioned the Holocaust. In 2011, he compared women to "children and the mentally handicapped." He called Carly Fiorina's face an "angry wife face" during the 2016 election. Then came 2023. That's when everything exploded. In a YouTube livestream, Adams discussed a poll about the phrase "It's OK to be white." His response? He told white people to "get the hell away from Black people," calling them a "hate group." The backlash was instant and brutal. Hundreds of newspapers dropped "Dilbert." His distributor dumped him. Publishers cut ties. The comic that had appeared in 2,000 newspapers was suddenly gone from mainstream media. Adams called himself "a disgraced and canceled cartoonist." He defended his comments as hyperbole. He said getting canceled actually improved his life. Conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk rallied to his defense. But the damage was done. Dilbert, once a symbol of workplace solidarity, had become a symbol of something much uglier.
Trump, Cancer, and the Final Days Adams relaunched "Dilbert" as "Dilbert Reborn" on his own website. He became a vocal Trump supporter, praising the former president's "persuasive" abilities back in 2015. Trump even invited him to the White House after winning in 2016. Then came the cancer diagnosis in May 2025. The same day, coincidentally, that Joe Biden announced his own prostate cancer diagnosis. Adams publicly revealed his cancer had spread to his bones. He said the odds of recovery were "essentially zero." By November, Adams was paralyzed from the waist down. He couldn't move his legs. The tumor near his spine had taken away his mobility. He entered hospice care at his home in Northern California. But even in his final weeks, Adams stayed online. He recorded YouTube videos from his bed. He asked Trump and RFK Jr. for help getting access to a cancer drug called Pluvicto that his insurance was delaying. "I am declining fast," Adams posted on X. "I will ask President Trump if he can get Kaiser of Northern California to respond." Trump responded: "On it!" Adams said he got an appointment the next day. He credited the Trump administration for the intervention. But the treatment couldn't save him.
A Complicated Legacy In a statement dated January 1st that his ex-wife read after his death, Adams tried to make sense of his life. "For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent," he wrote. "That worked, but marriages don't always last forever and mine eventually ended in a highly amicable way." He talked about his books, particularly "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big." He said he'd tried to add value to people's lives. "I had an amazing life," he wrote. "I gave it everything I had." Trump released a statement calling Adams "a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn't fashionable to do so."
So What Do We Do With Dilbert Now? Here's the question everyone's wrestling with: Can we separate the art from the artist? "Dilbert" made people laugh for 35 years. It captured something real about modern work life. The frustration. The absurdity. The feeling of being just another cog in the machine. Millions of people taped Dilbert strips to their cubicle walls. They forwarded them to coworkers. They saw themselves in that engineer with the tie that flipped up. But the man who drew Dilbert said terrible things. Racist things. He questioned the Holocaust. He made offensive comments about women. And in his later years, he didn't apologize he doubled down. Fans are now debating whether it's okay to still enjoy Dilbert. Some say the comic stands on its own. Others say they can't look at it the same way anymore. Adams himself seemed to struggle with his legacy. In his final message, he wrote that he hoped his work brought "joy to lots of lonely people." Did it? For a long time, yes. But by the end, Scott Adams had become as divisive as some of the characters he satirized. He died in Pleasanton, California, at his home. His family was with him. He left behind a body of work that once united people and later divided them. Rest in peace, Scott Adams. Your legacy is complicated. But then again, so are most legacies worth talking about.
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