Trump: Scott Adams Was the 'Great Influencer'

Scott Adams spent years lampooning middle managers; in the end, a president was among those paying tribute. Adams, the Dilbert creator whose cubicle humor made him a workplace icon before his political commentary got him dropped by hundreds of newspapers, died Tuesday at age 68. His ex-wife, Shelly Miles Adams, announced his death on a livestream, reading a statement he had written: "I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had." Adams had disclosed in 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and said he chose to speak publicly after Joe Biden revealed the same diagnosis.

Adams turned doodles on his cubicle whiteboard at Pacific Bell into Dilbert, launched in 1989 and eventually running in more than 2,000 papers. The strip's deadpan take on corporate fads, jargon, and bad bosses helped define 1990s office culture, spawning books like The Dilbert Principle, an animated series, and a flood of merchandise, the Washington Post reports. He liked to say his success was built on failure, citing a Dilberito food line that made people "very gassy" and a money-losing restaurant as evidence he embodied his own theory that the least suited often land in charge.

Over time, Adams became better known for online provocation than office satire. He questioned Holocaust death tolls on his blog, wrote about men's rights in language critics called demeaning to women, and reinvented himself as a commentator on persuasion and politics, predicting Trump's 2016 win and later visiting the White House. "He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn't fashionable to do so," Trump said Tuesday on Truth Social, calling Adams "the Great Influencer." "He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease," Trump said. "My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners."

Born in 1957 in Windham, NY, Adams studied economics after earning low marks in a college drawing class and worked as a banker and engineer while honing his cartooning at 4am before work. He was twice married and divorced. Late in life, he argued his legacy would rest less on Dilbert than on two philosophical novellas, God's Debris and The Religion War, the latter featuring a wall encircling and wiping out fundamentalist extremists—a plot he described as a prediction rather than an endorsement. In the statement his ex-wife shared, he said he had become a Christian as a last-minute roll of the dice, NBC News reports. "I'm not a believer but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So here I go," he said, adding: "The part about me being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven."