Scott Adams

Scott Raymond Adams was born on June 8, 1957, in Windham, New York, in the Catskills, to Paul and Virginia (née Vining) Adams. He described himself as about half German, with English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Dutch ancestry. A devoted fan of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, he began drawing comics at the age of six and won a drawing competition at eleven. He later said that a childhood belief he had a small amount of Native American ancestry was not borne out by 23andMe genetic testing.

Adams graduated from Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School in 1975 as valedictorian of a class of 39 students. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, in 1979. While working in banking in San Francisco he studied for a Master of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business), graduating in 1986. He also took Dale Carnegie Training courses, which he called life changing, and said he was trained as a hypnotist.

From 1979 to 1986 Adams worked at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco. He started as a teller and, after being robbed at gunpoint twice in four months, joined a management training program, later working as a computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager and supervisor. He moved to Pacific Bell in 1986, where he would wake at 4 a.m. to pursue side projects. Cartooning was the one that worked. His former boss Mike Goodwin suggested the name Dilbert, and Dogbert (first called Dildog) was loosely based on the family's late beagle, Lucy. After rejections from magazines including The New Yorker and Playboy, a letter from a fan encouraged him to persist.

Dilbert launched with United Media in 1989, with the first strip appearing on April 16, 1989, while Adams kept his day job and drew in the early mornings. His first monthly royalty check was $368.62. The strip was in 100 newspapers by 1991 and 400 by 1994, a rise Adams credited to printing his email address in the panels and using readers' workplace stories as material. He left Pacific Bell on June 30, 1995, and became a full-time cartoonist as the strip reached 800 papers. By 2000 Dilbert ran in about 2,000 newspapers in 57 countries and 19 languages.

Outside comics, Adams founded Scott Adams Foods in 1999, maker of the vegetarian Dilberito burrito, which he exited in 2003 after the product failed to catch on. He co-owned Stacey's Cafe in downtown Pleasanton, with a second location in Dublin, California, and co-founded WhenHub, a service offering live video chats with subject experts. In November 2025, with his hands failing, he stopped drawing Dilbert and handed the finished art to his art director while continuing to write the strip.

Adams met Shelly Miles at a gym in Pleasanton, California, where she worked and he was a customer. They married on July 22, 2006, aboard the yacht Galaxy Commodore on San Francisco Bay, and he became stepfather to her two children, Savannah and Justin. Justin died of a fentanyl overdose in 2018 at the age of 18, a loss Adams spoke about publicly. Adams and Shelly divorced in 2014 but remained friends, with Shelly moving a block away; it was Shelly who announced his death in January 2026.

On Christmas Day 2019 Adams announced his engagement to Kristina Basham, a model and baker with two daughters who also served as a vice president at WhenHub. They married on July 11, 2020, and announced their divorce on March 10, 2022. Adams had no biological children. He lived for decades in Pleasanton, in a custom-built home on the east Pleasanton ridge with a tribute to Dilbert in its architecture. He was a firm believer in daily affirmations, writing a goal down 15 times a day, a technique Dogbert also used in a 1989 strip.

Adams wrote often about religion and free will. His novella God's Debris (2001) set out a pandeist idea in which God destroys itself to see what will happen, becoming the universe, and The Religion War (2004) continued the theme. In 2017 he said those books, rather than Dilbert, would be his ultimate legacy. Shortly before his death he said he would convert to Christianity on pragmatic, Pascal's wager style grounds, and his final message said he had accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

Politically he said in 2016 that he did not vote and belonged to no party, and in 2008 described himself as leaning libertarian. He endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, writing extensively about Trump's persuasion techniques, and said the support cost him speaking work, income and friendships. He opposed COVID-19 masking and made claims about vaccination that PolitiFact rated incorrect. He also wrote widely on persuasion, systems over goals and reframing thoughts, themes of Win Bigly, Loserthink and Reframe Your Brain.

Adams's public commentary repeatedly drew criticism. In a 2006 blog post he questioned whether official Holocaust death figures were based on sound research, and a 2011 post comparing how society treats women to how it treats children and the mentally disabled was widely condemned. In 2019 he apologised for a poorly worded tweet promoting WhenHub during the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting. In 2020 he said the Dilbert TV series had been cancelled because he was white, although at the time he had blamed ratings and scheduling. Several of his political predictions appeared on Politico's annual lists of worst predictions.

On a February 22, 2023, livestream, reacting to a poll about the phrase "it's okay to be white", Adams described Black Americans as a "hate group" and told white people to "get the hell away" from them. Newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the USA Today network dropped Dilbert, Andrews McMeel Syndication cut ties on February 27, 2023, and his publisher Portfolio cancelled a planned book. Adams defended the comments as hyperbole taken out of context, disavowed racism, and on March 13, 2023, relaunched the strip as Dilbert Reborn on Locals.

Adams published dozens of Dilbert compilations, from Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons (1992) to Dilbert Turns 30 (2019), alongside business satires such as The Dilbert Principle (1996), The Dilbert Future (1997), The Joy of Work (1998) and Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel (2002). His other books include God's Debris (2001), The Religion War (2004), Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! (2007), How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (2013), Win Bigly (2017), Loserthink (2019) and Reframe Your Brain (2023).

The animated Dilbert series premiered on UPN in January 1999, with Daniel Stern voicing Dilbert and Adams as executive producer and showrunner with Larry Charles; it ran two seasons and earned a Primetime Emmy Award. Adams made a cameo in the NewsRadio episode "Review" (1996) and appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, Fox News and podcasts including Making Sense with Sam Harris and The Tim Ferriss Show. From the mid-2010s his daily livestream Real Coffee with Scott Adams, later The Scott Adams School, ran on Periscope, YouTube, Locals and X, and the YouTube channel passed 200,000 subscribers.

Dilbert gave a generation of office workers a vocabulary for pointless meetings, clueless bosses and corporate jargon. Strips were photocopied, pinned to cubicle walls and emailed around the world, and the Dilbert principle entered management writing. Adams was ranked among the Thinkers50 most influential management thinkers in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007, reaching 12th in 2005. His later career as a pro-Trump commentator, and the 2023 comments that ended Dilbert's newspaper run, left a divided legacy: admirers praised his insight and kindness, while critics said his statements on race had done lasting harm. In his final message he asked anyone who had benefited from his work to pay it forward, and his family invited supporters to pass one of his books on to someone who might need it.

Adams won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year and its Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1997. That year Dilbert became the first fictional character to appear on Time magazine's list of the most influential Americans. He received the Orwell Award in 1998 for "Mission Impertinent", his San Jose Mercury News West Magazine account of posing in disguise as a management consultant and persuading Logitech managers to adopt a meaningless mission statement. The Dilbert animated series earned a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999. He appeared on the Thinkers50 ranking of management thinkers four times between 2001 and 2007.

Adams lived for years with focal dystonia, which disrupted his drawing hand from the early 1990s and again from 2004, leading him to draw on a graphics tablet and later with his left hand. He also had spasmodic dysphonia and underwent surgery in July 2008 that improved his voice.

In May 2025, a day after Joe Biden's diagnosis became public, Adams announced on Real Coffee that he had stage IV prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. He prepared for physician-assisted death in June 2025 but began testosterone blockers that eased his pain. In November 2025 he asked President Trump on X for help obtaining the drug Pluvicto, and soon reported he would receive it through Kaiser Northern California. He became paralysed below the waist during radiation therapy and in January 2026 disclosed heart failure.

He died under hospice care at his home in Pleasanton, California, on the morning of January 13, 2026, at the age of 68. His former wife Shelly Miles read his final message, written on New Year's Day, on what would have been that day's livestream. Tributes came from President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and many friends and guests of his show. The in-person memorial was private, and a celebration of life hosted by Greg Gutfeld was livestreamed on January 25, 2026. His resting place has not been made public.