Scott Adams, Trump-loving Dilbert cartoonist known for racist rants, has died

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip and a major supporter of Donald Trump, has died at age 68.

Dilbert was once popular for satirizing corporate life — incompetent bosses, promotions without raises, and absurd policies. But his strip was dropped by many leading newspapers in 2023 because of racist comments he made on his YouTube show. He sometimes dealt in misogyny, transphobia, and anti-Semitism as well.

Adams died Tuesday at his home in Pleasanton, California. Shelly Miles Adams, one of his two ex-wives, announced his death on a livestream. She read a statement he had prepared, saying, “I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had.” Scott Adams had revealed in May that he had metastatic prostate cancer.

Adams worked as a teller and in managerial positions at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco and an engineer at Pacific Bell, jobs that gave him material for Dilbert. At Crocker, he passed the time in “dull meetings” by drawing caricatures of his colleagues, who shared them by facsimile, The New York Times reports. He once sent his supervisor a memo on how to improve the bank’s operations, and that got him into a management training program. He also earned a master of business administration degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, and he joined Pac Bell that year.

Two years later, he sent samples of Dilbert to newspaper syndicates, and United Feature Syndicate picked up the strip in 1989, initially distributing it to 35 papers. He left Pac Bell in 1995 to devote full time to his cartoon, which was eventually carried by about 2,000 newspapers. He went on to publish Dilbert collections and business books, and there were Dilbert tie-in products and an animated TV series.

The eponymous lead character “was a frustrated engineer working from a cubicle at a high-tech company whose intelligent, anthropomorphic pet, Dogbert, dreamed of world domination,” the Times notes. “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.”

Many corporate drones could relate to the strip, but some critics didn’t find it so funny. “To speak bluntly about power inequities — and to work with others to challenge them — could be truly threatening to corporate poohbahs,” progressive activist Norman Solomon wrote in his 1997 book The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh. “In contrast, sarcasm is fine. Dilbert does not suggest that we do much other than roll our eyes, find a suitably acid quip, and continue to smolder while avoiding deeper questions about corporate power in our society.” Adams went on to lampoon Solomon.

Adams aroused more criticism later. In a 2006 post on his blog, he wondered “how the Holocaust death total of 6 million was determined,” The Washington Post reports. A few years after that, he wrote about “men’s rights” by saying, “You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a woman tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance.”

Then in 2023, on his livestreamed YouTube show, he called Black Americans “a hate group” because a survey showed a quarter of Black respondents disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.” Adams commented, “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.”

That led Andrews McMeel Universal, then syndicating and publishing Adams’s work, to drop him. Many major newspapers dropped him on their own. Adams claimed the remarks were hyperbolic, and he won fans among conservatives, including Elon Musk, the Post notes. Adams rebooted Dilbert on an online subscription site.

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He also drew fire in 2022 for introducing Dilbert’s first Black character, an engineer named Dave who says he identifies as white. It was a critique of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and some saw it as a putdown of transgender identity as well. Then in 2023, when President Joe Biden said he would nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court, Adams said in a social media post that he would now identify as a Black woman. (Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was confirmed to the court.)

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In 2014, however, Adams used his strip to lambaste an antigay court ruling from India. The nation’s highest court had ruled that a law banning “carnal acts against the order of nature” was constitutional. Adams had Dogbert call the ruling “hopelessly ignorant” and announce that “Asok the intern is now officially gay.” The cartoonist then had Asok saying he has “a lot of gay stuff to do.” Some U.S. newspapers wouldn’t run the strip.

He became associated with Trump in 2015, with Adams predicting Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the next year’s presidential election. In 2017, Adams published a book titled Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, about Trump’s way of attracting supporters without providing details of his policies. Trump apparently liked it and invited Adams to the White House.

Adams later said he paid a price for supporting Trump. “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 show last October. “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.”

He also said Trump helped arrange for his treatment with the cancer drug Pluvicto, which Adams’s insurer had approved but failed to schedule, but he had to postpone the drug’s use because it conflicted with his radiation treatment.

Trump posted about Adams on Truth Social. “Sadly, the Great Influencer, Scott Adams, has passed away,” he wrote. “He was 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. My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”