First of the Drop 40 to fall, Scott Adams held a love of drawing cartoons from an early age, but this wasn’t an easy or particularly well-paid industry to crack. He instead started out in corporate office jobs, where his disillusionment left him spending much of the 1980’s trying to find a different outlet. He revisited his childhood love of cartooning, which led to his breakout comic strip, Dilbert.
Launching in 1989 in the United Feature Syndicate, Dilbert started out as a strip that mostly focused on the personal life of the titular software engineer and his pet, Dogbert. His original choice of name for the pet was Dildog, but wisely dropped that for fear of any printing errors omitting the G! The key to success for Adams was embedding his email address into his comics. This early adoption of web-based feedback enabled him to quickly realize what his most popular strips were, leading to the switch to office based satire. Dilbert exploded in popularity over the course of the 90’s and went on to run in over 2000 newspapers around the world. The expanding franchise soon launched books, an animated series, video games, and even an ill-conceived line of vegetarian Dilbert-branded burritos.
So, Scott Adams had it all. Money, success, a food line failure he could make jokes about, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. As the 90’s and 00’s gave way to a society that at least tried to be more socially inclusive of race, gender and sexuality, Adams went the in the other direction. Enter Real Coffee with Scott Adams, his anti-woke podcast and early advocate for MAGA.
After years of increasingly controversial political and social commentary, in 2023 he described black people as a hate group and warned white people to “stay the hell away from them”. Despite protestations of not being a racist and that he was just warning people to be safe, within a week nearly all remaining outlets still running Dilbert had dropped it, and it was relaunched as a paid subscription webcomic, to little fanfare and poor reception.
The end came in the form of a Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis that had already metastasized to his bones. He announced it the same day as Joe Biden, with a trademark dig at him in the process. The fight was not a long one as his health rapidly declined over the latter half of 2025 and by the end of the year, he was clearly approaching his final few days. Ranting on livestreams to the last, he ultimately passed away with a reputation for being even more of a cartoon than anything he ever drew.
Winning Bigly for the DDP!
Scott Adams, Drop 40 Joint #27
June 8, 1957 – January 13, 2026, Age 68
51 Teams 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀+40 = 11 Points
6 Teams 🃏 = 22 Points