How Scott Adams built his empire of influence
One day in the late winter of 2018, Scott Adams broadcast a video of himself as he wept tears of joy.
In his hand was a smartphone playing another video. On the screen, a senior official from South Korea was announcing the first-ever talks between a sitting president of the United States and the leader of North Korea.
The talks would not bring peace, nor would they lead to the removal of nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula. But they would end a period of tension that had lasted for years and threatened to erupt into war.
The reason Scott wept was not just because he was happy to learn that there was hope for diplomacy. The reason he wept was because he had helped bring it about.
He was a man who drew a comic strip for a living. He also wrote books and hosted a daily livestream during which he drank coffee with thousands of fans.
Through the strength of his ideas, he became, for a moment in history, one of the most powerful voices in American politics. He had planted the idea that the crisis with North Korea — in which each side had traded threats of war — could be resolved without violence. That it was a conflict of psychology, not militaries.
So it was. And North Korea — however briefly — came out of the shadows.
That was why President Trump called Scott the “Great Influencer.” He knew firsthand how powerful Scott really was — he followed Scott’s ideas from the Oval Office.
In fact, the idea of a “Great Influencer” is very close to the “Prime Influencer,” a character that Scott had invented in a futuristic novel he wrote decades before.
The Prime Influencer, in Scott’s story, was an ordinary person who could change the world through the simple act of sharing seemingly ordinary ideas that ripple outward to move civilizations. Scott’s fictional Prime Influencer could even stop wars and bring about peace.
But Scott hinted that the Prime Influencer might really exist and that we could find him, or her, if we looked hard enough. Perhaps artificial intelligence had the computing power to figure it out, he suggested.
Was it him? Scott himself?
It might have been.
And if it wasn’t, Scott seemed to know who.
***
Scott turned an extraordinarily successful career as a cartoonist into a platform for ideas that changed politics, business and culture.
Without Scott, Donald Trump (probably) would have been elected president. But he might never have been as “consequential” — Scott’s word — as he turned out to be. In that way, among others, Scott Adams changed the world.
Scott first became famous for the “Dilbert” comic strip, whose eponymous character was a highly intelligent engineer trapped in a corporate maze where his best efforts were almost always undone, where the most incompetent person in the company — the “Pointy-Haired Boss” — was in charge, and where the laziest colleague always managed to thrive.
“Dilbert” was first published in 1989 and ran for 34 years in more than 2,000 newspapers around the world. Despite the simplicity of its art and the comic’s uniquely narrow focus on a workplace environment, it was a runaway success. “Dilbert” resonated with millions of Americans adjusting to a service economy in which management struggled to keep up with technological innovations, particularly computers and the internet.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was also a fan of Scott’s and of “Dilbert.” That was confirmed in a 2018 email Musk sent to his employees at Tesla
“In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a ‘company rule’ is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change,” Musk wrote.
The success of “Dilbert” allowed Scott to explore other areas of publishing and business. There, too, he often enjoyed tremendous success.
Scott’s first book, “The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions,” grew out of a Wall Street Journal article in which he had explained: “The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.”
“The Dilbert Principle” was just the first of many bestsellers that Scott published.
Throughout his books, Scott invented words that would become widely used. In his 1997 bestseller “The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century,” Scott introduced the word “confusopoly,” defined as “companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price.” The term escaped the humor genre, entered academic literature and is now recognized as a real economic concept.
“Pearls Before Swine” creator Stephan Pastis told me that Scott was the last of the great cartoonists of the print era, specifically, “the last syndicated cartoonist who reached a level of celebrity” that made him “a household name.”
That career alone would have provided enough material for a biography. But Scott wasn’t done. He moved past humor and into other kinds of writing. In 2013, Scott published the instant bestseller “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life,” which changed self-help and became a kind of “urtext” of the genre.
“How to Fail” also brought Scott an entirely new audience, one that wanted more than laughs. So Scott launched a blog on his Dilbert website to offer nonfiction commentary on ideas and current events. It was one of those blog posts that made Scott instantly famous for a whole new reason.
***
Scott predicted in the summer of 2015, when presidential primary debates had just begun, that Donald Trump would win the 2016 general election. Scott’s blog post “Clown Genius,” in which he explained his reasoning behind the then-longest shot prediction, became a cultural sensation and remains legendary.
For the post, Scott drew on his training in hypnosis, which he had taken up in his 20s, to insist that Trump had powers of persuasion greater than any human being he had ever encountered. At the time, Scott’s prediction seemed clownish, even to politically clued-in Republicans.
Scott’s own persuasion skills were formidable. And by the end of the campaign, Scott had popularized the very idea of “persuasion” as a topic of political debate. Some observers wondered whether Scott had merely predicted Trump’s unlikely victory or if he had also made it happen.
After Scott passed away in January 2026, President Trump delivered a video message from the Oval Office to Scott’s memorial service.
“There was nobody like him,” the president said.
Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner agreed, telling me that Scott was a “huge, special and influential person in my life and the world.”
His wife, Ivanka, Trump’s daughter and another key adviser in the first Trump administration, told me that she was not just a “fan” of Scott’s but also a close follower.
“He was really a voice in my mind” as she worked in the administration, she said.
Both Jared and Ivanka pointed to the importance of Scott’s bestselling book about the 2016 election. “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter” (2017) used Trump’s victory to describe Scott’s unique worldview — and to explain how readers could apply the tools of Trump’s political success in their professional and personal lives.
It turned out that President Trump read “Win Bigly” and met with Scott in the Oval Office in 2018, telling him how amused he was at how well Scott understood him personally. That meeting of the persuasion minds made Scott even more influential within the inner circles of the administration. Staffers would tune in frequently to Scott’s daily livestream, “Coffee with Scott Adams.” In addition to joining in the ritual of the “simultaneous sip” of coffee, many took policy and messaging ideas directly from Scott.
Trump adopted Scott’s optimistic catchphrase “the Golden Age” as a slogan. First introduced by Scott in 2017 as a way of describing the current state of the world despite the pessimism of daily news headlines, the phrase soon became one of the president’s favorite refrains. It reflected Scott’s own outlook as much as a presidential futurecast.
Trump himself may have tuned in to Scott’s daily livestream. He certainly read transcripts of what Scott had said. Few other human beings have ever been so closely followed by the president of the United States — any president.
Scott persisted despite the fact that he encountered bitter opposition once he became associated with Trump in 2015 — and despite the fact that he lost his entire author platform after he made controversial comments on race in 2023. But Scott survived that turmoil because of the close rapport he had spent years developing daily with his audience.
By the time he passed away in January 2026, Scott had well over 1 million followers on the social media platform X. His influence continues to expand to this day.
“Scott Adams: A Life of Persuasion and Principle” will be released at Amazon.com on Thursday, November 12.
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