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- Never Trust a Rich Guy
I do some Salesforce consulting so I know a little more about Salesforce culture than the average person.
Marc Benioff is the billionaire who owns Salesforce. He has worked diligently to make it appear that he cares about issues that Democrats care about. Salesforce has a conference called “Dreamforce” in San Francisco every year. It’s billed as the largest software conference on Earth. Whether that’s true or not, it’s pretty big, and it’s always held in San Francisco.
Dreamforce is held in the Moscone Center, not the world’s best neighborhood. When I attended it around 8 years ago, I saw a homeless person drop trou and take a shit on the street in the middle of the day, and we were accosted by a clearly very high person one evening. I never felt unsafe, but I could see why Salesforce (and Benioff) might be a little concerned about the neighborhood where their big conference is held.
Benioff makes a lot of noise about Salesforce being a big family, and Dreamforce has a kind of benediction where Benioff brings in some members of a Hawaiian tribe and has a ceremony to bless the event. He also talks about “Ohana” (family) — a Hawaiian term. Michelle Obama has addressed Dreamforce in the past. Salesforce literature is always careful to show a wide variety of races and genders, and at the Dreamforce I attended, you could put your pronouns on a pin.
So, the company has a veneer of social engagement and liberalism, especially in the good times. But when it comes down to hard times, it’s clear that it was nothing but a veneer — on the inside, Benioff is not very different from any other Silicon Valley billionaire.
Days after his comments advocating for President Donald Trump to send the National Guard into San Francisco ballooned into a controversy, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was slated to appear at a press event on Monday afternoon with Mayor Daniel Lurie. Then it was cancelled.
The abrupt change came after Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan once viewed as relatively liberal, came under fire over the weekend for praising Trump in an interview with The New York Times and lambasting the city’s approach to combating crime, saying the city should “refund” the police force—even though the police budget has grown and violent crime rates are down.
“San Francisco’s public safety challenges are real and complex, and we need to continue exploring every possible pathway to create a safer city for everyone,” Benioff, who once hosted a dinner for then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said in a post on the social media platform X following his interview with the Times […]
It’s unclear exactly what’s prompted Benioff’s pivot toward Trump, but Salesforce does business with the federal government and tech moguls from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have spoken favorably of the president in what many analysts say is an attempt to preserve their own business interests in the face of a commander-in-chief who has sought to punish his enemies.
It’s clear to me what prompted the pivot — all the other rich guys are doing it. Benioff bought Time Magazine when it was Silicon Valley cool to buy a media outlet, and now he wants the National Guard to invade San Francisco when its Silicon Valley cool to be a MAGAt.
The guy has no real moral center or durable political beliefs. When it was easy and somewhat fashionable to run a company in a way that would make liberals happy, he did. Now that it’s hard, he isn’t going to do that anymore.
This is the kind of person that the Democratic establishment treasures as a donor. When it comes down to the hard part, they’re absolutely untrustworthy. I get it that the party needs money and these guys have it, but I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze.
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