Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the “Dilbert” comic strip, has died at the age of 68, his first ex-wife revealed on Tuesday. Adams said last year that he was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer.Adams’ ex-wife, Shelly Miles, announced the news of his death during a live stream of his YouTube show, “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” She read a “final message” from Adams on the show, in which he wrote that he had “an amazing life” and gave it everything he had. He urged people to “be useful” and said, “please know I loved you all to the very end.” Adams said on an episode of his show last May that he had “the same cancer that Joe Biden has … prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones.”He made the announcement a day after Biden announced his own diagnosis. President Trump posted about Adams’ death on Tuesday, calling him “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,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social. “My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”Dilbert the comic strip first appeared in 1989, poking fun at office culture. It ran for decades in numerous newspapers until 2023, when it was canceled by most newspapers over comments by Adams that various publishers denounced as racist, hateful and discriminatory. Among other things, Adams referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and urged White people “to get the hell away from Black people.” Newspapers such the Los Angeles Times and the USA Today network as well as distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced they would no longer work with the cartoonist or run his strip. Adams took to YouTube at the time to defend himself and disclosed details about the impact of losing business, saying he was likely to lose 80% of his income from Dilbert due to the cancellations.In the message Miles read on the show Tuesday, Adams said that he wanted to explain his life. He said he spent the first part of it focusing on making himself a worthy husband and parent as a way to find meaning, then later “donated” himself to the world and evolved from Dilbert cartoonist to “an author of what I thought would be useful books.””From that point on I looked for ways I could add the most to peoples’ life, one way or another,” he wrote.
