"Dilbert" comic strip creator Scott Adams, a vocal supporter of US President Donald Trump whose career faltered after a racist outburst, has died at the age of 68, his wife said.
Shelley Miles announced Adams' death in a live online broadcast, in which she read his final message. His comic strip, which mocked life in the office "cubicles" of corporate America, was based on the title character - an engineer recognizable by his glasses and perpetually bent tie, Reuters reports.
Adams wrote on the X Network about his worsening condition due to metastatic prostate cancer and made a direct appeal to Trump to influence his health insurer, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, to schedule him for treatment with the targeted radiation therapy drug Pluvicto.
"I'm working on it," Trump responded in a social media post on November 2.
On Tuesday, the Republican president mentioned the cartoonist's death on the Truth Social network.
"Sadly, a great influencer, Scott Adams, has passed away. He was a fantastic man, who loved and respected me when it was not fashionable. He fought a long and courageous battle against a terrible disease," Trump wrote.
The comic strip "Dilbert" was first published in 1989 and ran for decades. At its peak, it was among the most widely distributed comics in the United States, but many newspapers dropped it in 2023 after Adams' racist rant surfaced on YouTube.
Adams called African Americans a "hate group" and suggested that white Americans "get the hell away from black people," responding to a poll by a conservative organization that claimed to show that many African Americans do not think it is "okay to be white," Reuters reports.
He later said that his statements were intended as hyperbole and that he disavowed racism, claiming that media reports ignored the context of his words.
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