After Salesforce founder Marc Benioff said he would support President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to San Francisco, local politicians were horrified.
“This is a slap in the face to San Francisco,” District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey posted on X, echoing sentiments of his colleagues in City Hall.
Major players in the tech world, on the other hand, stayed silent to avoid involving themselves in such a complicated and fraught political question.
Just kidding.
“It’s the only solution at this point,” Elon Musk wrote on X about Benioff’s National Guard statement. “Nothing else has or will work.”
For most of the past decade Benioff has supported and donated to liberal causes. But then, so have many other billionaires who grew fond of Trump before last year’s election — or on the morning of Nov. 6.
Now that Benioff has said flat-out that he supports bringing in the National Guard as de-facto cops in the city to shut down open-air drug markets, others in the tech scene see it as a turning point in ongoing culture war over DEI, immigration laws, and more.
“Good game liberals, nice playing with you,” venture capitalist David Sacks posted on X (opens in new tab).
Others expressed more nuanced reactions to Benioff’s remarks, which he made in a phone call from his private jet to a New York Times reporter.
“Benioff is boot licking, but he’s not completely wrong,” wrote Adam Nathan (opens in new tab), CEO of Blaze AI, an AI marketing company. “San Francisco allowed rampant drug dealing to go on for years. Thousands have died as a result, and our judges keep releasing them.”
National Guard troops have been sent, over the objection of state governors, to Portland, L.A., and Chicago, ostensibly to help with immigration enforcement and crack down on crime. But judges have been blocking the deployments, saying the Trump administration has failed to prove that crime is out of control or that protests have interfered with federal immigration enforcement.
While many San Franciscans see similar issues happening here, especially when it comes to the city’s open air drug markets, whether the military should get involved is another question.
“We don’t need the National Guard,” Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wrote on X (opens in new tab). “We need new judges who are not hardcore Chesa Boudin-style activists who work to keep drug dealers out of jail even though the police, the district attorney and the people of SF want them locked up.
“It’s shockingly that simple.”