Quick Facts About Kristina Basham: Personal Life, Career and Her Role During Scott Adams' Final Days

When Kristina Basham met Scott Adams on Christmas Day 2019, few could have foreseen the trajectory that awaited them both. The 31-year age gap between the then-90-year-old cartoonist and the accomplished 31-year-old pilot was not lost on observers, yet their engagement that same holiday season felt, in the moment, like genuine romance.

Seven months later, on July 11, 2020, they were married aboard a yacht in San Francisco Bay. Two years would follow — years marked by music, aviation and the kind of partnership that briefly seemed to offer Adams a new chapter after his previous marriage had fractured.

Yet when Adams' cancer diagnosis came in May 2025, everything changed irrevocably. By January 2026, as he lay in hospice care at his Pleasanton home, Basham's presence — and her absence — would frame the final narrative of the Dilbert creator's life.

Kristina Basham was born on July 31, 1988 in Walnut Creek, California. At 37 years old, she had already assembled an extraordinary résumé. A commercial pilot and flight instructor at Fiori Aviation, she had logged countless hours in the cockpit, sharing her aviation passion with over 3.7 million Instagram followers.

Yet flying was merely one facet of her identity. A former child model for Ford Inc., she was also an accomplished pianist and violinist. She held a master's degree in economics and was pursuing a neuroscience degree at the University of California, Berkeley, undertaking the kind of intellectual rigour one would not necessarily expect from someone solely defined by her marriage to a famous cartoonist.

When she and Adams married in 2020, Basham entered the orbit of a man whose career had defined an entire generation's experience of office monotony. Dilbert, which had appeared in over 2,000 newspapers globally and spawned numerous best-selling books and merchandise lines, was a cultural phenomenon.

Yet by the time of their union, the comic's creator was already beginning to fracture. Within two years, in March 2022, Adams announced their divorce on his podcast with the kind of matter-of-fact brevity one might expect from someone accustomed to public disclosure: 'I am separated, slash going through a divorce'.

What remained unspoken was the emotional terrain beneath that announcement. The previous year, in 2021, Basham had inspired some of Adams' most publicly romantic gestures. Yet whatever tenderness existed between them could not withstand the gravitational pull of Adams' increasingly controversial public persona. By late 2022, their marriage had dissolved, and Basham relocated mentally and professionally to concerns beyond her ex-husband's orbit—her children, her career, her education.

Kristina Basham During Adams' Final Illness: Bearing Witness to a Life's Twilight

The final chapter of Scott Adams' life, however, would re-entangle their narratives in unexpected ways. In May 2025, Adams disclosed publicly what he had likely feared privately. He had stage four metastatic prostate cancer, the aggressive variety that had already migrated to his bones.

His prognosis was bleak. He spoke openly about his condition on his daily livestream, Real Coffee with Scott Adams, becoming something of a real-time philosopher of mortality as his body failed and his mind remained crystalline. By January 2026, Adams was receiving round-the-clock hospice care at his home. His ex-wife Shelly Miles, along with other family members, were with him as the end approached. Yet Basham's presence — or more precisely, her story — loomed in the background. In June 2024, she had announced that she was eight months pregnant. By March 2025, she held her newborn son.

The father's identity remained private, but the symbolic resonance was unmistakable: whilst Adams was declining, Basham was creating. Whilst he was editing his Dilbert archives and recording what he suspected might be final messages, she was navigating the demands of new parenthood and her demanding career.

Adams died on Jan. 13, 2026, his ex-wife Miles announcing his passing through tears on their shared YouTube channel. In his final written statement, penned on New Year's Day and read aloud after his death, Adams reflected on his marriages with measured gratitude. 'Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus, a new meaning', he wrote, in a language that suggested both acceptance and loss.

Meanwhile, life continues for Kristina Basham. She remains a commercial pilot, a student of neuroscience, a mother and a pianist. Her Instagram feed occasionally features her young son, glimpses of aircraft, as well as the quotidian details of a life unfolding in aviation and ambition.

In many respects, she has moved on from the intense, brief marriage to a man who would ultimately become more defined by his illness and his final podcasts than by the corporations and workplace absurdities that Dilbert had once lampooned. Yet her presence in Adams' story, both during their marriage and in the years that followed, remains part of the larger narrative of a complicated man who loved, remarried, divorced again and faced his mortality with the same unflinching directness he had applied to satirising middle management.