Marc Benioff’s Quarterly Crises Are Bad for Business
Salesforce workers (and executives!) are pissed off. How many more controversies until Benioff is pressured into an early retirement?
In October, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff kicked off a weeks-long firestorm because he said he supported a federal incursion of San Francisco. It took him a while to quasi-apologize; his comments overshadowed Dreamforce 2025, and he had to get bailed out by the President of the United States, who eventually posted that he wasn’t going to invade San Francisco because Benioff (among others) very nicely asked him to hold off.
That was Q4. It’s Q1, meaning it’s time for another Marc Benioff Self-Perpetuating Crisis Earning Call. Benioff has gamely delivered on time, on target. Benioff’s market sentiment is bleak—his employees are furious at him. “Ohana” is at an all-time low. Benioff’s stock is falling faster than Bitcoin prices. We’re just missing an inscrutable “apology,” a blurry selfie, and a bailout from President Donald Trump.
I want to run through Benioff’s last few weeks, because they’re instructive. Benioff, like other fence-sitting tech billionaires, is still making decisions based on an outdated MAGA mindset. He’s operating like it’s January 2025, when a Trump “vibe shift” seemed somewhat plausible. The tide turned months ago, but Benioff is completely oblivious. He’s lagging behind the general public, which is why he’s the subject of ridicule and panicked critiques from Salesforce employees and executives.
Two weeks ago, Benioff gestured towards real life and posted a pixelated photo of the Minnesota state flag. He captioned the X post, “May the One who brings Peace bring Peace to All.” Some commenters confused the Minnesota flag with the flag of Somalia, and got mad at him. Benioff chose to rebut these claims—which came from the likes of “BTCBama” (147 followers) and “usdsss14” (87 followers)—but he did not mention President Trump, or ICE, or DHS, or even what transpired in Minneapolis (ICE agents killed two Americans).
Having wiped his hands clean, Benioff moved onto the Super Bowl. He teased a Super Bowl ad with Mr. Beast over and over and over again. He posted a series of selfies with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who recently dropped his smol bean act and somehow become more unlikable), with musicians Machine Gun Kelly and will.i.am, with Veneered Mr. Beast, and with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft (who has some peculiar mentions in the Epstein Files).
The Mr. Beast advertisement ran during the Super Bowl. It promised $1 million to whomever solves a series of puzzles with the assistance of the new, AI-powered Slackbot. Mr. Beast has produced endless content for children and teenagers, which a parody account used as the basis for a joke about Salesforce attracting a much, much younger clientele.
“This ad was be genius,” wrote @BradCarryVC. “My 9-year old and all his friends are creating Salesforce accounts right now. And they’re all making cold calls to B2B decision makers and generating SQLs for enterprise SaaS companies. Mr. Beast just created 1 billion new CRM users.”
At 11:12 pm PST, after the New England Patriots got spanked by the Seattle Seahawks, Benioff (an alleged Patriots fan) sent a seemingly earnest reply to the parody account: “We’ve had over 53M people hit this page since the spot ran. 1.32M in the last 15 minutes. Beyond any expectation we could have had. @MrBeast is an absolute genius.” The rollout for the $1 million contest did not go well.
Benioff jetted to Las Vegas for the annual internal Company Kickoff event. He could have easily offered a generic statement about how he was troubled by recent events in the United States, or something along those lines. Instead, he asked attendees who’d traveled from abroad to stand up, and then made a “joke” that ICE agents were present, according to Joshua Bote at Gazetteer San Francisco. Benioff made another ICE “joke” threat later in his speech, and also apparently lamented that he didn’t understand what Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance was about.
Bote reviewed internal Slack messages at Salesforce, which included a complaint with more than 800 supportive emoji reactions: “It’s hard to believe this company still has values when you make completely off-base jokes about ICE in your opening keynote. That’s unacceptable.”
I looked at other internal Salesforce messages, and counted 20 more that angrily criticized Benioff. “The most out-of-touch and inappropriate thing I’ve ever personally heard an executive say in my 25+ years of working in software,” one worker wrote. “The message I’m taking away from Marc’s kickoff is: quarterly results > values,” another wrote.
Salesforce workers have also been circulating an open letter, which they reportedly plan on sending to Benioff this week, asking him to denounce ICE and commit to not striking business deals with the federal agency. Benioff’s offensive remarks seem to have lit a fire—the number of employee signatures has swelled to more than 2,000, I’ve been told.
I doubt Benioff realizes how out of touch he is, and I doubt he cares about the chaos he’s once again wrought. Salesforce executives are genuinely freaked out, though.
“I want to acknowledge the jokes that happened this morning at CKO,” Slack general manager Rob Seaman wrote in an internal message, according to Business Insider. (Slack is owned by Salesforce.) “I cannot defend or explain them. They do not align with my personal values and I know this to be the case for many of you as well.” Seaman continued: “I assume there will be a statement that addresses them. If there isn’t, I’ll talk about it in the next all Slack call, and then I hope we can highlight what was actually super positive from the morning.”
Business Insider relayed another internal message from Salesforce VP Craig Broscow, who did some throat-clearing about how great Salesforce is doing, before admitting that Benioff’s comments are “overshadowing everything else” and it “would be a step in the right direction… for Marc to acknowledge as soon as possible—ideally publicly—that his attempted joke was extremely upsetting to large segments of his employee base.”
As of Thursday afternoon, Benioff has yet to say a peep. I assume he and his crisis PR team are waiting for the open letter to be sent his way, so he can respond to everything at once.
I’m not sure there’s much he could say or do at this point to get back on solid footing. Every time Benioff opens his mouth, he makes things worse for Salesforce and its workers. Benioff isn’t Elon Musk—there is a point where he could be pressured into a “please stop embarrassing us” early retirement. It’ll take a few more fuck-ups, but he’s well on his way. I’ll be back with more analysis after the Q2 Benioff Earnings Call.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
OpenAI fired one of its top safety executives “on the grounds of sexual discrimination, after she voiced opposition to the controversial rollout of AI erotica in its ChatGPT product,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The executive, Ryan Beiermeister, was informed that she was fired because she sexually discriminated against a male colleague. The WSJ report doesn’t include specifics about the sexual discrimination allegation; it does, however, mention that Beiermeister “started a peer-mentorship program for women” at OpenAI. Multiple sources said that Beiermeister was against ChatGPT’s pornographic pivot, and that she worried OpenAI’s “mechanisms to stop child-exploitation content weren’t effective enough.” She told the WSJ that the allegation against her is “absolutely false.”
Israel arrested two people for allegedly using classified military information to place bets on Polymarket, according to Bloomberg. The (fairly plausible) social media speculation is that the bets were about impending strikes against Iran.
Will Lewis, the disgraced, fired publisher of The Washington Post, was pulling a salary upwards of $3 million, according to Gene Weingarten. A separate H1B form states a salary of at least $2 million. Whether it was $2 million or $3 million or somewhere in between, it’s indisputable that Lewis spent his brief tenure swimming in cash while whining about the Post’s untenable financial situation. Rather than paying him a bloated salary to tinker with stupid, unusable AI products, the Post could have simply continued to employ dozens of actual journalists.