Scott Adams

Scott Raymond Adams (June 8, 1957 – January 13, 2026) was an American cartoonist, author, and conservative commentator. He was the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and nonfiction works of business, self-improvement, commentary, and satire.

Adams worked in various corporate roles before he became a full-time cartoonist in 1995. By the mid-1990s, Dilbert, created in 1989, had gained national prominence in the United States and began to reach a worldwide audience, remaining popular throughout the following decades and spawning several books written by Adams. In the mid-2010s, Adams emerged as an independent commentator on events and politics.

He wrote in a satirical way about the social and psychological landscape of white-collar workers in corporations. In addition, Adams wrote books in various other areas, including the pandeistic spiritual novella God's Debris and books on political and management topics, including Loserthink.

In February 2023, Dilbert was dropped by numerous newspapers and its distributor, Andrews McMeel Syndication, after Adams made racist comments on his Real Coffee YouTube channel, which he defended as hyperbole. He relaunched it as a webcomic on his Locals website one month later and continued to be active on social media. Adams announced he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2025 and retired from drawing that year, but stated he would continue writing Dilbert as long as he was able. He died on January 13, 2026, at the age of 68.

Early life and education

Scott Raymond Adams was born on June 8, 1957, in Windham, New York, to Paul and Virginia (née Vining) Adams. He said that he was "about half German" and had English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and Dutch ancestry. In 2016, he said he had a small amount of Native American ancestry, but later discovered via 23andMe genetic testing that he has no detectable Native American genetic markers. He was a fan of Peanuts comics while growing up and began drawing comics at age 6. He won a drawing competition at 11.

Adams graduated from Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School in Windham in 1975 and was the valedictorian of his class of 39 students. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, in 1979. He then moved to California and worked there. In 1986, he earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley. Adams took Dale Carnegie Training courses and called them "life changing".

Career

Office worker

Adams worked closely with telecommunications engineers at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco between 1979 and 1986. Upon joining the organization, he first worked as a teller. After four months in which he was twice held up at gunpoint, he entered a management training program. His positions included management trainee, computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager, and supervisor.

He later shifted to work at Pacific Bell. Devoting time to building a new career, he woke up every day at 4 a.m. and spent time on various endeavors; cartooning proved to be the most successful of them. Adams created Dilbert during this period of personal exploration. The Dilbert name was suggested by his former boss, Mike Goodwin. Dogbert, originally named Dildog, was loosely based on his family's deceased pet beagle Lucy. His submissions of Dilbert and other comic panels to various publications, including The New Yorker and Playboy, were not published, but an inspirational letter from a fan persuaded Adams to keep trying. He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 30, 1995, and the personalities he encountered there inspired many of his Dilbert characters. In 1989, while still employed at Pacific Bell, Adams launched Dilbert with United Media. To maintain his income, he continued to draw his cartoons during the early morning hours. His first payment for Dilbert was a monthly royalty check of $368.62. Dilbert gradually became more popular. It was syndicated in 100 newspapers in 1991 and 400 by 1994. Adams attributed his success to his idea of including his email address in the panels, which resulted in feedback and suggestions from readers.

Full-time cartoonist and author

Adams's success grew, and he became a full-time cartoonist as Dilbert reached 800 newspapers. In 1996, his first business book, The Dilbert Principle, was released. It expounded on his concept of the Dilbert principle. In 1997, Adams won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist and Best Newspaper Comic Strip. Logitech CEO Pierluigi Zappacosta invited Adams to impersonate a management consultant, which he did wearing a wig and false mustache. He tricked Logitech managers into adopting a mission statement that Adams described as "so impossibly complicated that it has no real content whatsoever". His writing in San Jose Mercury News West Magazine regarding the incident earned him an Orwell Award. By 2000, the comic was in 2,000 newspapers in 57 countries and 19 languages.

His comic strips were adapted as an animated television series, which premiered in January 1999 and ran for two seasons on UPN. Adams served as executive producer and showrunner, along with Seinfeld writer Larry Charles. The show earned a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999. Adams later said that the show had been canceled because he was white and UPN had decided to shift toward African-American viewers.

In addition to his cartoon work, Adams wrote books in various other areas, including self-improvement and religion. His book God's Debris (2001) lays out a theory of pandeism, in which God blows itself up to see what will happen, which becomes the cause of our universe. In The Religion War (2004), Adams suggests that followers of theistic religions such as Christianity and Islam are subconsciously aware that their beliefs are false, and that this awareness is reflected in their consistently acting as if these religions, and their threats of damnation for sinners, are untrue. In a 2017 interview, Adams said that his books on religion, not Dilbert, would be his ultimate legacy.

On a February 22, 2023, livestream of his Real Coffee with Scott Adams program, Adams reacted to a poll that asked if respondents agreed that "it's okay to be white", a phrase described by the Anti-Defamation League as associated with the white supremacist movement. The poll showed 26% of black respondents disagreed with the statement and 21% were not sure. Adams, upset that nearly half did not agree, described black people as a "hate group" and said "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away". In response to those and other related comments, Dilbert was dropped by numerous newspapers across the country, including The New York Times (in its international print edition), Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today-affiliated newspapers. Andrews McMeel Syndication, the distributor of Dilbert, announced on February 27, 2023, that it was severing all ties with Adams for his racist remarks. Portfolio, his book publisher, announced it was dropping his non-Dilbert book that was scheduled for release that September. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole and as taken out of context in reportage; he disavowed racism and asserted that nobody would disagree with what he said were his main points: do not discriminate and avoid things that look like they will put one at risk. On March 13, Adams relaunched Dilbert as Dilbert Reborn on the subscription website Locals, minus the earlier Dilbert comics.

On November 15, 2025, he announced he would no longer draw Dilbert because his right hand had focal dystonia and his left hand was semi-paralyzed, but would continue writing the strip as long as he was able to. His art director took over as the artist.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams

In 2015, Adams wrote blog posts predicting that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills, and he started writing about Trump's persuasion techniques. His pieces on this topic grew popular, so he started writing about it regularly. Adams soon developed this as a daily video presentation called Real Coffee with Scott Adams, distributed to Periscope, YouTube, and ScottAdamsSays.com.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams featured guests such as Naval Ravikant, Ed Latimore, Dave Rubin, Erik Finman, Greg Gutfeld, Matt Gaetz, Ben Askren, Carpe Donktum, Steve Hsu, Michael Shellenberger, Carson Griffith, Shiva Ayyadurai, James Nortey, Clint Morgan, and Bjørn Lomborg. In 2018, Kanye West shared multiple clips on Twitter from a Coffee episode titled: "Scott Adams tells you how Kanye showed the way to The Golden Age. With Coffee." In 2020, President Trump retweeted an episode where Adams mocked Joe Biden. Adams offered paid subscriptions for exclusive content on Locals. In 2020, Adams said: "For context, I expect my Dilbert income to largely disappear in the next year as newspapers close up forever. The coronavirus sped up that inevitable trend. Like many of you, I'm reinventing my life for a post-coronavirus world. The Locals platform is a big part of that."