Once a leading liberal voice in tech, billionaire Marc Benioff has shifted his support to President Trump, following the lead of many of his
Caleb Ecarma at Oligarch Watch:
Once a leading liberal voice in tech, billionaire Marc Benioff has shifted his support to President Trump, following the lead of many of his peers in Silicon Valley. In a recent interview, Benioff, the 61-year-old chief executive of software giant Salesforce and owner of Time magazine, said that he “fully supports” Trump and his plan to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco. “I think [Trump is] doing a great job,” he added. He has since walked back his support for a National Guard deployment following widespread backlash. But Salesforce, the largest private employer in San Francisco, has explored other ways to support — and profit from — Trump administration policies.
In August, Benioff’s company approached Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about using its artificial intelligence systems to boost the agency’s massive recruiting drive, according to a New York Times report last week. To help achieve the president’s goal of deporting tens of millions of immigrants, the Trump administration has prioritized recruiting thousands of new ICE agents. In documents authored by Salesforce, the company offered to help ICE nearly triple “its workforce by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.” Salesforce, a company that specializes in cloud computing, marketing, analytics, and AI applications, also informed ICE that it could “implement an aggressive, high-yield marketing strategy” and “identify, engage and acquire the talent profile proven to drive ICE mission success, and in turn, administration priorities.”
Salesforce’s enthusiasm for Trump’s deportation regime is noteworthy, given that Benioff has spent the past decade using the company to launch headline-grabbing attacks against Republican policies. In 2015, Benioff said that Salesforce would no longer send its employees to Indiana after the state passed a bill that would have enabled businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ customers. Benioff’s threat resulted in Indiana revising the bill. The following year, Benioff said Salesforce would cut its spending in Georgia following a bill that would allow businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ patrons. Georgia’s governor then vetoed the bill. And in 2021, Benioff promised that Salesforce would pay for Texas employees to relocate following the passage of the state’s draconian anti-abortion law.
By carefully managing his public image over the years, Benioff has attempted to market himself as one of the few altruistic billionaires and his company as a force for good.
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Benioff’s rightward turn began in earnest with the COVID-19 pandemic, when he relocated from San Francisco to a beachside mansion in Hawaii. Since then, he has repeatedly called for San Francisco to beef up its police force and adopted a more pessimistic tone, predicting that the city would never go “back to the way it was.” More recently, Trump has threatened to send troops to San Francisco, which he claimed had been “destroyed” by Democrats. “We’ll clean that one up, too,” he said in August. Benioff threw his support behind the idea — an intimidation tactic the president has used against other Democratic majority cities — earlier this month, saying, “We don’t have enough cops, so if [the National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it.”
Marc Benioff’s turn to the right in recent years is a sad betrayal.
