Donald Trump, Elon Musk Pay Tribute to ‘Great Influencer’ Scott Adams

“There are three people that have changed this country in the last 10 years,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld declared on air on Tuesday. “Trump, Musk, and Scott Adams.”

President Donald Trump and tech titan Elon Musk were also among those who paid tribute to the cartoonist, best known as the creator of the office-set satirical comic strip Dilbert and later in life as a conservative commentator, who died on Tuesday at age 68 after a battle with cancer.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Adams’ first wife and caregiver, Shelly Adams, announced via livestream on Tuesday that Adams had died while in hospice care at his Northern California home. Adams, who later in his career became a podcaster, revealed last year that his prostate cancer had spread to his bones and appealed to the President, for whom he was a vocal supporter, for help. Trump at the time said he would intervene to help Adams with his treatment.

“Sadly, the Great Influencer, Scott Adams, has passed away,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday. “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. My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., added in his own post on X about Adams: “Your candid commentary and sights will be truly missed. You taught us all so much.”

Musk also eulogized Adams in a post on X.

“Even though I knew his death was coming, as he told us it would, I still can’t believe he has died,” Musk wrote. “Rest in peace, good and great man, rest in peace.”

Adams left his own final message for the world, sharing how his desire to “add the most to people’s lives, one way or another” took him from cartoonist to author of several nonfiction “useful books” to host of a podcast “dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way.”

“I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I’m asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want,” Adams wrote. “Be useful. And please know I loved you all to the end.”

Adams was married to Shelly Miles from 2006 to 2014, and to his second wife, Kristina Basham, from 2020 to 2022. He was a stepfather to Miles’s two children—one of whom died of a fentanyl overdose in 2018—and Basham’s two children.

In the livestream announcing Adams’ death, Erica, a friend of Adams, called him “our best friend, our internet dad, our uncle, our mentor, our sage.”

Popular cartoonist

Adams told the New York Times in 2003 that he had wanted to be a cartoonist since he was five-years-old, but “when you reach an age when you understand likelihood and statistics, you lose that innocence that anything is possible.” For years, he followed a corporate path, but along the way, through cartoons scribbled out to amuse his colleagues, Dilbert was born.

While working at California-based telephone service provider Pacific Bell, Adams sent a batch of Dilbert comic strips to cartoon syndicates. The first strip was distributed by United Feature Syndicate to 35 newspapers and officially appeared on April 16, 1989.

“For many downtrodden office workers, posting a Dilbert cartoon in their cubicle became a tiny flag of independence,” libertarian writer and lecturer James Bovard wrote in a tribute to Adams for the New York Post that first published last month and was updated after Adams’ death. “For tens of millions of his fans, Adams will always be the guy who brightened their lives by brilliantly mocking the absurdities and indignities they faced each day.”

Dilbert was among the first comics to be situated in an office—and came years before many popular workplace sitcoms like The Office. Dilbert’s titular character, an engineer working in a cubicle at a high-tech company, goes through many of the routine yet farcical aspects of corporate bureaucracy that many Americans were familiar with. Other characters in the comics included Dilbert’s anthropomorphic megalomaniacal pet, Dogbert; his oblivious manager, known only as Pointy-Haired Boss; his co-workers, Alice, Asok, and Wally; and the sadistic head of HR Catbert.

Dilbert became a household face and name: he was turned into plush doll merchandise, desktop computer games, and even a vegetarian microwave burrito called the Dilberito that contained 100% of the daily recommended intake for 23 essential vitamins and minerals. At the peak of its popularity, Dilbert appeared in around 2,000 newspapers in at least 70 countries and 25 languages.

Adams won the prestigious National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award in 1997. That same year, Dilbert was the face of a $30 million advertising campaign for Office Depot and the character was named one of TIME’s most influential Americans—the first fictional character to make the list.

“We are rooting for him because he is our mouthpiece for the lessons we have accumulated—but are too afraid to express—in our effort to avoid cubicular homicide,” TIME wrote at the time.

Adams became the first syndicated cartoonist to include his email address in his strip in 1993, according to the Associated Press. He told the Times in 1995 that he was amazed to find so many readers who could relate to his comics.

“I heard from all these people who thought that they were the only ones, that they were in this unique, absurd situation. That they couldn’t talk about their situation because no one would believe it,” he said.

Dilbert was also made into an animated TV series that premiered in 1999 and ran for two seasons before being canceled in 2000—which Adams controversially claimed two decades later was due to him being white. The series, which was helmed by Adams and Seinfeld writer Larry Charles, won a Primetime Emmy Award in the year it premiered.

Adams’s 1996 book The Dilbert Principle draws on an idea introduced in his strip that “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 in 1997. “Through Dilbert, I would think the balance of power has slightly changed.”

He eventually turned to writing more books, including several nonfiction ones about business. These have included How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (2013); Win Bigly (2017); Loserthink (2019); and Reframe Your Brain (2023).

Adams’s 2004 novel The Religion War tells the story of a man trying to stop a calamitous war between Christians and Muslims. Adams told Bloomberg in 2017 that his religion-themed books would be his “ultimate legacy.” In his final message, he said that while he was “not a believer,” he was converting to Christianity because “the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive.”

To admirers, Adams “obliterated the dogmas propagated by bootlicking Washington pundits,” Bovard wrote. Bovard added in a post on X that Adams’s “BS radar deserves to be in the Smithsonian Institute.”

In 2015, Adams predicted Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, against most political forecasters, and endorsed him for President, suggesting that a presidency under Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would diminish the status of men. The cover of Win Bigly features an illustration of Dogbert wearing what appears to be a toupee resembling Trump’s hair. The book won Adams the attention of Trump, who invited him to a meeting at the White House.

“You’ll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe,” Adams wrote in his final message. In 2020, Trump tweeted a clip from Adams’s podcast in which Adams mocked then-presidential nominee Joe Biden.

“Scott Adams was a true American original, and a great ally to the President of the United States and the entire administration. My prayers go to Scott and all of you who loved him,” Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X on Tuesday. “We lost one of the good ones but we’ll never forget him.”

Gutfeld, who called Adams a “mentor” and one of his “closest friends,” wrote in a tribute to Adams on X, “you changed more lives and made the world infinitely better. God bless you and thank you for everything you did for me.  We will always love you.”

Controversial figure

Adams debuted his podcast Real Coffee with Scott Adams in 2018, on which he commented on social and political news.

In a column published by conservative outlet National Review prior to Adams’s death, Kathryn Jean Lopez praised his free-flowing commentary, which he had delivered daily for years even through sickness. “He’s talking about some of the news of the day while trying to stay awake,” she wrote. “He’s doing what he has become accustomed to do. And you get the impression he’d really rather talk about the news of the day than the day he might die.”

In a February 2023 livestream, Adams shared a Rasmussen Reports poll that found that only 53% of Black respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white,” a phrase that has been associated with the alt-right movement and co-opted as a slogan by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Adams called Black Americans a “hate group” and said he did not “want to have anything to do with them.”

“And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” he said in the episode. He added that he had previously “identified” as Black “because I like to be on the winning team,” but after seeing the poll would “re-identify as white.”

Adams later defended his remarks, calling them hyperbole and said his words had been taken out of context.

But by then, his reckoning was swift. Many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the USA Today Network, as well as distributor Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped Dilbert. The Sun Chronicle, a local newspaper in Attleboro, Mass., left the space occupied by Dilbert blank for a month “as a reminder of how racism has pervaded our society.”

Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin Random House, canceled the release of Adams’s then-forthcoming book Reframe Your Brain, which he later self-published.

The controversy led to closer scrutiny of past comments Adams had made. In a since-deleted blog post from 2006, Adams questioned the official 6-million death toll of the Holocaust. In another blog post from 2011, Adams wrote that “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone.” In another post from that year, Adams compared banning rape to ordering lions not to eat zebras, spawning a Change.org petition at the time to “tell Scott Adams that raping a woman is not a natural instinct.”

In an episode of his podcast from January 2023, Adams said “anti-vaxxers clearly are the winners at this point” of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keith Knight, an illustrator and cartoonist, told NPR in 2023, “It begs the question, now that everyone is piling on him, what took so long?”

After losing much of his backing in 2023, Adams posted on Twitter, “Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out-of-context news of course). Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me.”

Adams relaunched his comic strip as Dilbert Reborn on the Rumble-owned subscription platform Locals in March 2023. 

Adams “was his own man, which is a rare thing,” conservative political commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. “He also died well — something even rarer still. He faced his death with clarity, courage, and honesty.  That was his final service to the world, and perhaps his most important.”

In another post, Walsh lambasted criticisms of Scott in light of his death. “To have monsters celebrate your death is not a bad thing. In fact it is a tribute,” he wrote. “But to die and have no one either mourn or celebrate, to die and be forgotten, to have left no impact of any kind on the world, to have your existence add up to nothing in the end — that is the greatest horror. And it’s the fate of basically every leftist who gloated over Charlie [Kirk], and gloats now over Scott.”

Battle with cancer

Adams shared on his podcast last May that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, although he had been dealing with the condition privately prior to his announcement because he feared that “once you go public, you’re just the dying cancer guy.” He said the cancer had spread to his bones and that taking ivermectin and fenbendazole had not helped.

“Every day, Adams goes live to talk, even in pain,” Lopez wrote in another column for National Review earlier this month. “God only knows how many people he is helping along the way with his public vulnerability.”

In November, he said in a social media post that he had been approved for Pluvicto, a targeted radioligand therapy used to treat prostate cancer that was approved by the FDA in 2022, but that his healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, had “dropped the ball” in scheduling his intravenous infusion. He directly appealed to Trump for help in bringing forward his treatment schedule.

“On it!” Trump posted on Truth Social in response.

The next day, Adams said he was scheduled to be treated with Pluvicto. “The Trump administration works fast,” he posted on X.

But in December, Adams shared that he was “paralyzed below the waist” and had to undergo radiation treatment, which would delay his Pluvicto treatment.

“I talked to my radiologist yesterday, and it’s all bad news—the odds of me recovering are essentially zero,” Adams said on his podcast on Jan. 1. “I’ll give you any updates if that changes, but it won’t.”

“You should prepare yourself that January will probably be a month of transition,” he added, “one way or another.”