Scott Adams, whose comic strip “Dilbert” defined a certain type of workplace culture for more than 30 years before its author was canceled for perceived racist comments, has died after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 68 years old.
The announcement came Tuesday via Adams' YouTube channel, where he streamed live daily until Monday morning.
The cartoonist, whose extremely dry humor and unorthodox political beliefs were on public display in recent years on his daily livestream “Coffee With Scott Adams,” spoke directly to his audience almost until his death, and received help from friends in his final days. .
Adams revealed his stage 4 cancer diagnosis in May 2025, shortly after former President Biden's metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis became public.
“Some of you have already guessed, so this won't surprise you at all, but I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has,” he said on his May 19, 2025 livestream. “I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I've had it longer than he has. Well, longer than he admitted to having it.”
He noted that both he and the former commander in chief suffered from “the bad kind” of prostate cancer.
“There is something you need to know about prostate cancer,” he said. “If it's localized and hasn't left the prostate, it's 100% curable. But if it leaves the prostate and spreads to other parts of the body… it's not 100% curable.”
Until last May, Adams had been using a walker for months and dealing with terrible pain because, he said, the cancer had spread to his bones.
Given all that, he said, “my life expectancy is maybe this summer. I hope to get out of this domain sometime this summer.” But Adams survived that prediction, broadcasting live from his hospital bed during a stay for radiation treatment before Christmas and picking up again from his bed at home after that.
Born Scott Raymond Adams on June 8, 1957, in Windham, New York, to a postal worker father and a real estate agent mother, he began drawing cartoons when he was 6 years old. Adams was valedictorian of Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School, earned his bachelor's degree in economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and then moved to California, where he earned a master's degree in business administration at UC Berkeley.
He continued to work for years at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell, performing the types of generic corporate office jobs that his comic strip would use as material. While at PacBell, he woke up before dawn every day to try to find an alternative career. The cartoons won.
“Dilbert,” which was released in 1989, went from being published in a handful of newspapers to, at its peak, appearing in more than 2,000 outlets in 57 countries and 19 languages. Adams received the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award, the industry's highest honor, in 1997. Page-a-day “Dilbert” calendars were best sellers for years, with more than 20 million “Dilbert” calendars and books in print.
His titles included numerous comic compilations, but also business books such as “Win Bigly” and “How to Lose Almost Every Time and Still Win Big.”
“If you like learning how to be more effective in life while catching up on interesting news, this is the channel for you,” reads the description on his YouTube page.
In February 2023, comments Adams made on his podcast were interpreted as racist, which had serious consequences on his career.
During a midweek livestream, Adams had analyzed the results of a survey that asked whether people agreed with the statement “It's okay to be white.” Among black respondents, 26% disagreed and 21% said they were unsure; a total of 47% did not believe it was okay to be white.
(The seemingly harmless phrase “It's OK to be white” had been adopted in 2017 for an online trolling campaign aimed at harassing liberals and the media, the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement at the time. The phrase also has a history of use among white supremacists.)
“If almost half of black people disagree with white people… that's a hate group. And I don't want anything to do with them,” Adams said in his usual deadpan expression. “And based on how things are going, the best advice I could give to white people is to stay away from black people. Just stay away. Wherever you need to go, just stay away. Because there's no solution to this. This can't be fixed.”
He continued, still deadpan, “So I think there's no point, as a white citizen of America, in trying to help black citizens. It doesn't make sense anymore. There's no rational impulse anymore. And that's why I'm going to stop helping black people in America, because it doesn't seem like it's worth it. I've been doing it my whole life and the only result is being called a racist.”
Within days, amid a backlash over Adams' alleged racism, several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, dropped “Dilbert.” Then his union, which had provided “Dilbert” to all the outlets that published the comic, dropped him as a client entirely. And Penguin Random House slammed the door when it rejected publication of his book “Reframe Your Brain,” which would have appeared that fall, and removed his back catalog from its offering.
Adams spoke about his own cancellation after the fact, saying a few days later on his livestream that he had been using hyperbole, “that is, an exaggeration,” to make a point. He said the stories that reported his comments had used a trick: “The trick is to simply use my quote and ignore the context I helpfully added later.”
But he said no one would disagree with his two main points, which were to “treat all individuals as individuals, without discrimination” and “avoid anything that statistically seems like a bad idea to you personally.” He also repudiated racists.
Adams finished the self-release of “Reframe Your Brain” in August 2023 with a dedication that read: “To the concurrent drinkers (thank you for saving me).”
Even after his excommunication from the mainstream, Adams' weekday morning livestreams regularly garnered tens of thousands of views on YouTube.
Adams married his girlfriend Shelly Miles, a mother of two, in 2006, and the marriage lasted eight years. The two remained friends after their 2014 divorce, and in 2018 Adams learned that her stepson Justin, whom she said she had “raised since he was 2,” had died of an overdose at age 18 after years of struggling with addiction. Adams fought back tears as he explained on his livestream that Justin's decision-making ability suffered after a head injury suffered in a bicycle accident when he was 14 years old.
