Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the “Dilbert” comic strip and later emerged as a prominent conservative voice and Donald Trump supporter, died Monday at age 68 after battling metastatic prostate cancer.
Adams’ ex-wife Shelly Miles announced his death Tuesday during a livestream of his YouTube show, “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reading a final message he had written on New Year’s Day.
“I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you get any benefits from my life, I ask you pay it forward as best you can,” Adams wrote. “Be useful, and please know I loved you all to the very end.”
Trump praised Adams as “a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so.”
“He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease,” Trump said in a statement. “My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”
Vice President JD Vance called Adams “a true American original.
Adams was “a great ally to the President of the United States and the entire administration,” Vance said. “My prayers go to Scott and all of you who loved him. We lost one of the good ones but we’ll never forget him.”
Adams announced his cancer diagnosis in May 2025, and said he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. On January 1, he told viewers of his podcast that he had spoken with his radiologist and received “all bad news,” saying there was no chance he would regain feeling in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure.
He told fans they should prepare themselves “that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another.”
Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, which satirized white-collar office culture based on his own experiences working in corporate offices. At its peak, the strip was syndicated in approximately 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and 19 languages.
Adams graduated from Hartwick College with a degree in economics in 1979 and earned an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. He spent nearly a decade working at Pacific Bell, where he started drawing Dilbert in his spare time, working on the strip mornings, evenings, and weekends from 1989 until 1995.
“You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle,” Adams told NPR in 2002. “But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday, as soon as I got escape velocity.”
The strip debuted in April 1989 and quickly gained a following among technology workers and office employees who saw their own experiences reflected in the pointy-haired boss and bureaucratic absurdity Adams depicted. Adams was awarded the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1997, joining an elite club with iconic artists including Charles Schulz, Gary Larson, and Matt Groening.
“Dilbert” spawned numerous books, a video game, and an animated television series that ran for two seasons on UPN from 1999 to 2000. Adams served as executive producer and showrunner alongside Seinfeld writer Larry Charles. The show earned a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999.
Adams became a prominent conservative voice beginning in 2015 when he started writing blog posts praising Donald Trump. He correctly predicted Trump would win the 2016 election, attributing it to Trump’s persuasive communication style. Adams, who described himself as a “trained hypnotist,” said he found similarities between hypnosis techniques and Trump’s rhetoric.
“I could go on for pages about how Trump has good-but-not-world-class skills in a variety of areas,” Adams wrote. “And when you put all of those talents together it makes him the most persuasive human I have ever observed.”
His daily video podcast featured conservative guests and commentary on political and social issues. Adams’ website stated his position on being canceled.
“If you believe the news, it was because I’m a big ol’ racist. If you look into the context, the point that got me cancelled 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.”
In February 2023, “Dilbert” was dropped by hundreds of newspapers after Adams made controversial comments during a YouTube livestream.
After syndication ended, Adams relaunched “Dilbert” as “Dilbert Reborn” on the subscription site Locals in March 2023. He continued publishing the strip on his website until November 2025, when complications from his cancer forced him to stop drawing. He continued writing scripts while his art director took over illustrations.
In his final message, Adams reflected on his life’s purpose.
“For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning,” he wrote. “That worked, but marriages don’t always last forever and mine eventually ended in a highly amicable way. I’m grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.”
Adams said he later “donated” part of himself to the world and evolved from Dilbert cartoonist to “an author of what I thought would be useful books.”
“From that point on I looked for ways I could add the most to peoples’ life, one way or another,” he wrote.
Adams died Monday at his home in Pleasanton, California. He converted to Christianity right before he passed away, and has joined the Lord.