Marc Benioff has bad day online, deletes posts (we kept receipts)

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s X feed has been getting attention for his ingratiating posts about President-elect Donald Trump. 

Now, Benioff’s effusive tweets about San Francisco — his hometown, where he founded his 25-year-old software firm — have veered in a weird direction. 

On Tuesday, Benioff took to X to extol the “crisp, fall day” in San Francisco and his favorite park, Tunnel Tops in the Presidio. (Benioff’s wife, Lynne Benioff, led the campaign committee to fund the recreation spot, which features a playground, public lawns, and views of the Golden Gate Bridge.)

“The city looks more beautiful and vibrant than ever, and I’ve never seen it so clean,” Benioff raved. “Tunnel Tops has to be my favorite park— anywhere.” By way of evidence, he attached a photo of Presidio picnickers basking in the sunny panorama.

The problem? A quick image search revealed that the suspiciously pixellated photo was ripped from the National Park Service’s website and depicted not Tunnel Tops but the Presidio’s West Bluff picnic area. According to image metadata, the photo was taken at least 10 years ago, long before Tunnel Tops opened in 2022. 

Was a homesick Benioff posting from his $24.5 million, 9,800-square-foot compound on Hawaii’s Big Island? Or could he simply not find a suitable photo in his camera roll of his “favorite park — anywhere?” Either way, by Wednesday morning, he had deleted the tweet after this correspondent pointed out the origins of the photo. 

It wasn’t the first odd tweet from Benioff’s account on that glorious fall Tuesday. Earlier, he’d posted a heart and an American flag in response to side-by-side images of Trump’s mugshot — taken after his indictment on election racketeering and related charges — and a recent cover image of Benioff’s publication Time, which named the president-elect its person of the year. That tweet, too, had been nuked by Wednesday. 

Earlier posts applauding Trump remain, however. Perhaps Benioff decided, or was convinced, that expressing love for the incoming president’s status as a felon was over the line? Benioff did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

Of course, it’s hardly unusual for a business honcho to suck up to Trump, who beat Vice President Kamala Harris to become the second U.S. president to win a nonconsecutive term. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he’s making a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inaugural fund, and the parade of executives kissing the ring at Mar-a-Lago has included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple boss Tim Cook. 

In Benioff’s case, however, his emoji-laden love letters are jarring in light of the PR blitz he undertook during Trump’s first term, when he penned a New York Times op-ed calling for a kinder, gentler capitalism. “Capitalism, as we know it, is dead,” he wrote, deriding inequality and climate change fueled by the pursuit of shareholder returns. 

Five years later, after Trump’s election victory, Benioff posted fawning praise for a screed by hedge funder Ray Dalio, who likened Trump to a corporate raider poised to bring efficiencies to the federal government.

We’re sure Benioff has his reasons for embracing Trump. After all, his own company has dealt with activist investors who think the $330 billion software behemoth has gotten bloated, overspending to achieve the growth investors expect. Salesforce has reportedly become a major federal contractor, deals it can ill afford to sacrifice to a vindictive president and his clique of Silicon Valley efficiency czars. In an interview with the Chronicle, Benioff called Trump’s second term an “opportunity for a new chapter.”

With Salesforce stock reaching record highs in December, shareholders likely don’t mind Benioff’s obsequious posts about the incoming president. 

But mixing up San Francisco parks? For the city’s most prosperous native son, that’s just embarrassing.