Scott Adams, whose experience as a bank and phone company middle manager gave him the material to create the comic strip “Dilbert,” a daily satire of corporate life that became a sensation but was dropped by more than 1,000 newspapers after he made racist comments on his podcast in 2023, died Tuesday at his home in Pleasanton, California, in the Bay Area. He was 68.

His former wife Shelly Adams confirmed his death, saying he had been receiving hospice care. Scott Adams announced in May that he had aggressive prostate cancer and that he probably had only a few months to live.

For more than 30 years, “Dilbert” chronicled the absurdities of the high-tech workplace and skewered management. The title character was a frustrated engineer working from a cubicle at a high-tech company whose intelligent, anthropomorphic pet, Dogbert, dreamed of world domination. Other characters included Dilbert’s co-workers, Alice, Asok and Wally; the hapless Pointy-Haired Boss; and Catbert, the fire-red-colored cat and evil head of human relations.

At its peak, “Dilbert” was syndicated to about 2,000 newspapers internationally, placing it in the realm of other popular syndicated strips like “Peanuts,” “Doonesbury” and “Garfield.” Adams also published numerous “Dilbert” collections and wrote business books, including “The Dilbert Principle,” which posits that “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.”

The strip also led to production of a short-lived animated TV series, plush Dilbert dolls, computer games and the Dilberito, a frozen vegetarian burrito, which flopped in supermarket sales after a few years. Dilbert himself was the star of a $30 million advertising campaign for Office Depot in 1997.

“One of the reasons for his success was that he was the first one to have an office-based strip with recurring characters people could identify with, like Alice, a really smart woman who never got attention or praise,” Alan Gardner, the editor of The Daily Cartoonist website, said in an interview.

Adams suggested that Dilbert gave voice to isolated cubicle dwellers. “That’s the amazing thing I found when I went on line a couple of years ago,” he told The New York Times in 1995. “I heard from all these people who thought that they were the only ones, that they were in this unique, absurd situation. That they couldn’t talk about their situation because no one would believe it.”

Over the years, Adams made remarks about women and Jews that brought him negative attention outside the silo of beloved cartoonist. He used his podcast, “Real Coffee With Scott Adams,” to offer free-flowing commentary on the news, a platform that led to the downfall of “Dilbert.” In February 2023, he was discussing a new Rasmussen Reports poll that found that only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white,” a phrase that has been promoted by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people,” he 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.”

The blowback came swiftly. Many major newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times (in its international print edition) dropped “Dilbert.” So did the USA Today Network, which at the time had more than 200 newspapers.

Soon after, Andrews McMeel Universal, which by then was syndicating “Dilbert” to about 1,400 newspapers, cut its ties to Adams. So did the business imprint of Penguin Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers, which dropped plans to release his semi-humorous advice book “Reframe Your Brain.” Adams self-published it later that year.

Adams defended himself on a subsequent podcast, saying that he was not a racist, and that he had been using hyperbole when he called Blacks a “hate group.”

He acknowledged that his comments had damaged his career. “Most of my income will be gone by next week,” he said. “My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this, am I right?”

He quickly resurrected “Dilbert” as “Dilbert Reborn” and made it available by subscription on the Locals subscription platform.

Scott Raymond Adams was born June 8, 1957, in Windham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. His father, Paul, was a postal worker. His mother, Virginia (Vining) Adams, was a real estate broker and an assembly-line worker. In a quiet household where Scott was the middle child, he was a wisecracker.

“The cynical part of me comes from my dad,” Adams 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.”

Scott wanted to be a cartoonist from age 5. But “when you reach an age when you understand likelihood and statistics, you lose that innocence that anything is possible,” he told the Times in 2003. So he took a business path: He graduated in 1979 from Hartwick College, in Oneonta, New York, with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

He went to work that year as a teller at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, but, because of dyslexia, he had trouble balancing his totals. He also was twice robbed at gunpoint, he said. After sending his boss a memo on how to run the bank better, he was sent to a management training program and rose to managerial positions while also completing a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986.

“Dilbert” emerged during dull meetings at Crocker when he sketched cartoons of his co-workers and bosses, he said. Colleagues faxed them around the bank.

He left for Pacific Bell in 1986 and, two years later, sent samples of the nascent strip to cartoon syndicates. United Feature Syndicate agreed in 1989 to distribute “Dilbert,” initially to 35 newspapers. He stayed at Pacific Bell until 1995, when writing and illustrating “Dilbert” became his full-time job.

The success of “Dilbert” gave Adams a platform to comment on a wide range of topics on his blog and podcast. Some of his views drew intense criticism. On his blog in 2006, he questioned whether the figure of 6 million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust was accurate or a big number “that someone pulled out of his ass.” Five years later, also on his blog, he wrote that “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. Its just easier this way for everyone.”

In 2015, he gave Donald Trump, then a New York real estate businessman and former reality TV star, a 98% chance of winning the next year’s presidential election, based on his powers of persuasion.

“His complete ignoring of facts are actually part of the persuasion because he doesn’t give you targets, he doesn’t give you details of his policies, usually,” Adams said on the HBO current-events comedy show “Real Time With Bill Maher” in 2016 before the presidential election. “So he’s reducing the number of targets while making you feel good and focus on the things he wants.”

Adams wrote “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter” (2017), a book about Trump’s power to persuade. It has a cover illustration of Dogbert wearing a Trumpian head of hair. The book earned him an invitation to the White House to meet the president.

He said his support for Trump in 2016 proved costly.

“When I decided that I would throw away my entire social life to back Trump and when I eventually threw away my entire career — which even before I was canceled, my licensing business and book sales went to almost nothing — because I was supporting Trump,” he said on his podcast in October 2025. “I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed my social life. I sacrificed my career. I sacrificed my reputation. I may have sacrificed my health. And I did that because I believed it was worth it.”

In November, he wrote on the social media platform X that his health was “declining fast,” and that his insurer had not scheduled a time to administer a cancer drug, Pluvicto, which it had approved. He asked for help from Trump. “On it!” the president responded on his social media outlet, Truth Social.

Adams later confirmed on social media that he would be getting the drug but that its use had to be postponed because of scheduled radiation treatment.

His marriages to Shelly Miles and Kristina Basham ended in divorce. He is survived by his stepchildren, Hazel, Marin and Savannah, as well as his siblings, Cindy and Dave. Another stepchild, Justin Miles, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2018.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Richard Sandomir/Thor Swift
c. 2026 The New York Times Company