Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce, will be hosting the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco next week. This week, the longtime liberal pledged his support for the Trump administration.
In an interview with the New York Times (opens in new tab) on Thursday, Benioff expressed support for sending National Guard troops to San Francisco and said the city should have 1,000 more police officers than it currently does.
“If they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said.
For most of the past decade Benioff has supported liberal causes like homelessness outreach and candidates like Hillary Clinton. But his affinity for conservative viewpoints has become apparent over the last year. On his X account, he has often flirted with right-wing ideas, ticking off staffers at Time Magazine, which he owns.
Benioff’s new beliefs are not necessarily informed, though, as he told The Times he has not been following recent news about immigration raids, gerrymandering laws, or the government shutdown.
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The interview was taken on Benioff’s private jet and was supposed to center on his recent philanthropic projects, which include a personal donation of $100 million to the UCSF children’s hospitals named after him.
Instead, the conversation turned political and drew frustration from Benioff’s public relations team — enough for him to hang up the call abruptly.
While Benioff’s statements track with a larger rightward shift in SF’s tech scene, they have already drawn ire from San Francisco public officials, including District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who posted on X Friday that Trump and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem “have turned so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups.”
Other political organizers are gearing up for the possibility of Trump sending troops to San Francisco, like he has done in L.A. and Chicago.
Jay Cheng, executive director of the moderate political group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, told The Standard that his organization is launching an ad campaign early next week that will advise Trump to keep the National Guard out of the city.
“Dear Mr Trump: No thanks, we’re good. xo San Francisco,” billboards in Washington, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago will read.
Cheng said the group will also run TV ads on Fox Business in an effort to show Trump that San Francisco “has done a lot to move to the political center and clean up its own act,” from recalling District Attorney Chesa Boudin and three San Francisco Unified school board members to bringing crime down to its lowest level in more than two decades.
“We want to be more aggressive than what we’ve seen from other cities in countering the narrative,” Cheng said.