It’s not criticizing Musk. It’s saying this guy, some liberal liar, was forced out by Musk. And it’s more clear in the next comic that he’s praising Musk: https://dilbert.com/strip/2023-01-11
No, it was freaking weird I tell you.
A New York Times piece published near the Dilberito’s launch has even more information. Through it, we learn that the product was “the first fast-food nutraceutical,” a description referring to the fact that its inclusion of so many “healthful ingredients” makes the creation “a vitamin pill wrapped in a tortilla.” Adams is quoted as calling the Dilberito “cubicle cuisine” while the article’s author says they “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste.”
He was pushing it like a cult leader promising that aliens hidden in a comet were going to take you to Heaven. That was my first hint that something was a bit off with him.
Me, too. Did you know, he was the first person to get Covid!
As above, only when their political agenda starts becoming obvious. I used to read Mallard Filmore a long long time ago, and I don’t remember it being extreme right wing nuttery. But now that it is, I don’t read it, because, what’s the point? I also avoid extreme left wing nuttery, but that’s not as easy to find.
Bill the Cat?
Heck, I don’t even understand how this strip is supposed to be insulting to whom, if it isn’t Musk. And pretty much all of the new employees in the strip are supposed to be idiots or annoying for some reason or another. Now if this guy had a “Vote Hillary” t-shirt on or something, I’d see the anti-liberal bias.
Boy, even I’m impressed at my obtuseness. Like I said, I’m pretty damned left on most issues. You tell me this guy’s apparently mocking my most strongly held beliefs, and I can’t even perceive it. 
I often wonder about people who seem to see offenses to their personal causes all around them. And here’s one you guys claim is aimed at what I hold dear, I read it every day, and I never perceived the insult?
I’ve got no reason to defend Adams. He sounds like a jerk. I just find his strip somewhat amusing more often than not, and it has never terribly offended me or my sensibilities. And I am the kind of guy who has, in the past, taken offense over something as silly as a comic strip.
Yeah, I must say at this point – the comic strip never did turn sociopolitically “ideological” to my eyes, but rather as many other strips do when they keep going a long time, it simply seemed to sort of “lose momentum”. Sometimes, with time, a creator just falls to oldfartitude, and the work gets to look tired. At heart it stayed still the strip from back in the 90s and early 00s only with the incidental characters representing whatever was trendy at the later time, and stuck to some repetitive schtick – such as that management are too fixated on whatever is the buzzword of the day even if they do not understand what the Hell it means.
I stopped followng regularly back when Dilbert still wore his tie, but whether before or after it has never come through to me as blatant ideoprop; more of having gone kind of tired and having always been ocassionally cringey, especially when trying to be current-topical.
Scott’s other activities and interests always struck me as not particularly noteworthy either pro or con. It’s his money and time if he wants to waste it. More lately, sure, the whole thing about mastery of manipulation did sound like he was giving himself too much credit for perception.
Adams is like a proto-Musk. He had enormous success with one thing, which lead him to believe that he was a universal genius. You could see signs of it back in 2007 when he released Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! It was supposed to be a self-deprecating look at how he had failed at everything before and after Dilbert, but it came across as an attack on everyone who stood in his way.
He went full MAGA before the 2016 election, predicting Trump would win. After that his blog got so heated that he stopped running it and moved to a podcast. From what I’ve seen at a distance, he now dwells in the same world as Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk other ultra-rightists.
Earlier this year some newspaper group cancelled almost all its comics, dozens of them. You’d never know that by the blowback, a swell of voices crying out that it had targeted specifically Dilbert because Adams was conservative.
But I’ll concede that he rarely allows that world to slop over into the comic. Mostly it’s the same tired jokes that seemed so fresh back in the 90s, but Peanuts went down that route for its second quarter century too.
Thanks guys for saying well what I was trying to. (Well, I doubt I would have used the word “ideoprop”!) 
Maybe I have some residual fondness for it simply because I hate my job and stupid cow-orkers, and I identify with his characters who hate their jobs and stupid cow-orkers.
I love Dick Tracy! Between the cameos from other strips(Annie and Warbucks are practically regulars), and the modern sensibilities when it comes to LBGTQ+ issues, I read it every day.
Referring to him, clearly sincerely, as “The most successful entrepreneur in the history of civilization” is not insult.
A few years back, Adams claimed that the Dilbert TV show was cancelled because Adams is white. No, really. He said UPN was going all black, and didn’t want a white man behind their shows.
Of the TV shows that debuted on UPN the seasons immediately after Dilbert was cancelled, most had primarily white casts.
It’s not all about you.
You asked a question, I answered it. Can’t help if you don’t agree.
If you followed digital media including social media, you’d understand the very specific and obvious reference being made.
Not that anyone’s required to do that, of course, but it’s healthy to reflect that if one does not consume all available sources of media, one is bound to miss some references to culture or current events.
In answer to the first question, no, I do not. Nor was I ever interested in SA’s political views. The point that I think you’re missing is that Adams has become completely unhinged, not just in the political dimension but overall. It would not surprise me if he needs to be institutionalized at some point. Whether it’s dementia or something else, I have no idea. But this is not a matter of “researching viewpoints”.
This is kind of an amazing statement now that I think of it.
I heard Adams being interviewed on public radio in 1998-1999. At the time I thought his comic was pretty good. But he came of as kind of an asshole in the interview.
I posted a comment to that effect on whatever online group I was participating in at the time, probably on Usenet. And the response was largely “Well, he is smarter than everyone else so he has a right to be obnoxious” or something like that. Pretty much exactly the kind of thing you would get from Musk aficionados in the depths of his popularity.
FWIW While I think Scott Adams turned into a creep and I hope he gets the help he needs for the anger a lot of this seems to come from, I still laugh sometimes at Dilbert and it has only been a few times his terribleness seems to have leaked into the comic overtly. This Twitter storyline (especially the crack today about censorship), the character he created who “identifies as white” is cringe, the couple times he drifted into “wokism” and maybe some others I forget. Otherwise, to date, it hasn’t changed all that much.
And as noted, an attitude that has been widespread for a LONG time in many fields. “I don’t care if he’s a (insert issue here), he gets results/makes money/is a genius.” We see it not only in relative celebs or public figures we see it in our day to day at our jobs, schools and families.
The bosses in Dilbert are “vilains” because they make dumb decisions that hurt the company and hurt the good workers, not because they are bosses or capitalists. When you read carefully you could see Adams ridiculed that bad decisions decreased productivity, caused Wally attitudes, and pushed the good workers away, it was not a call for justice. (TBF, mass-hiring Twitter/Meta/etc. ex-employees during an industrywide downsize just-because hey, cheap desperate bodies, regardless of whether thay know whay YOUR company is about, would be a daft decision; that would be a fair arc – though ISTM Adams back in the old days would most likely not have specifically identified Twitter/Elon but just spoken of some composite company with a hipster culture)
You are correct - I do not follow social media, and I perceived no reference. Was the reference in the way a character was drawn or in the words used? And what was being referred to?
From my position of ignorance, I perceived that as exaggerated praise mocking Musk’s self promotion and his terribly high opinion of himself.
This talk of a comics creator who turned into a bitter conservative during the course of his tenure reminds me of Badger, an indie comic from the 80s-90s. When Clinton became president, series writer Mike Baron slipped into a conservative bent, when the comic had pretty much been apolitical before.
Badger was Deadpool 20 years earlier, an insane multiple personality war veteran who meets a 5th-century druid who had been in a 1500 year coma in a mental institution, and winds up working for him when they are both discharged. Among the cast of characters was Riley, a black martial artist who moonlighted as an economics professor. Sometimes there would be cutaway scenes of Riley lecturing to his class notions of complete nonsense, such as converting 401Ks to kung-fu DVDs. The whole series was like that, inserting eccentric Python-like segues completely out of left field.
After Clinton’s election, the series devolved into a constant stream of criticism of liberals, which got boring fast. One issue had Badger fight Janet Reno, Clinton’s US Attorney General. Another had Badger get kicked out of a liberal-owned rooming house because he called them “yib-yobs,” which they thought was racist.
One that really stuck in my craw was a panel where Riley tells the group “Well, I have to get back to the university. My students think you create wealth by increasing taxes.” Has Baron never been to college? None of the classes I ever took had a prevailing student groupthink dictate the course. None of them had a prevailing student groupthink period. We were too busy trying to complete assignments and keep from failing the class to have an opinion.
The whole right wing conspiracy is that Twitter was run by liberals who secretly controlled what information was being promoted (ie liberal propaganda about the fake coronavirus) and deleted (the real truth). The idea is that Musk is forcing out all those people. Here’s a Scott Adams tweet from a few months ago that references it
That’s the joke when the guy says he’s really good at lying.