Scott Adams, Creator of ‘Dilbert,’ Dies at 68

“The take on office life was new and on target and insightful,” Sarah Gillespie, who helped discover Dilbert in the 1980s at United Media, told The Washington Post. “I looked first for humor and only secondarily for art, which with Dilbert was a good thing, as the art is universally acknowledged to be… not great.”

The first Dilbert comic strip officially appeared April 16, 1989, long before such workplace comedies as Office Space and The Office. It portrayed corporate culture as a Severance-like, Kafkaesque world of heavy bureaucracy and pointless benchmarks, where employee effort and skill were underappreciated.

The strip would introduce the “Dilbert Principle”: The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.

“Throughout history, there have always been times when it’s very clear that the managers have all the power and the workers have none,” Adams told Time. “Through Dilbert, I would think the balance of power has slightly changed.”

Other strip characters included Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss; Wally, a middle-aged slacker; and Alice, a worker so frustrated that she was prone to frequent outbursts of rage. Then there was Dilbert’s pet, Dogbert, a megalomaniac.

In "Dilbert" world, corporate office drone Dilbert (right) often had to contend with Dogbert's megalomania.

Everett Collection

“There’s a certain amount of anger you need to draw Dilbert comics,” Adams told the Contra Costa Times in 2009.

In 1993, Adams became the first syndicated cartoonist to include his email address in his strip. That triggered a dialogue between the artist and his fans, giving Adams a fountain of ideas for the strip.

Dilbert was also known for generating aphorisms, like “All rumors are true — especially if your boss denies them” and “OK, let’s get this preliminary pre-meeting going.”

“If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others,” Adams wrote in his 1996 book The Dilbert Principle.

In one real-life case, an Iowa worker was fired from the Catfish Bend Casino in 2007 for posting a Dilbert comic strip on the office bulletin board. In the strip, Adams wrote: “Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?” A judge later sided with the worker; Adams helped find him a new job.

The collapse of the ‘Dilbert’ empire

While Adams’ career fall seemed swift, careful readers of Dilbert saw a gradual darkening of the strip’s tone and its creator’s descent into misogyny, anti-immigration stances and racism.

It all collapsed quickly in 2023 when Adams, who was white, repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group.” He later said he was being hyperbolic, yet continued to defend his stance.

Almost immediately, newspapers dropped Dilbert and his distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with the cartoonist.

“He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, the creator of the strip On the Fastrack, told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support with him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the consequences of saying them.”

Adams relaunched the same daily comic strip under the name Dilbert Reborn via the video platform Rumble, popular with conservatives and far-right groups. He also hosted a podcast, Real Coffee, where he talked about various political and social issues.

“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,” the president posted on his social media platform Truth Social.