Several hours after the New York Times quoted him calling on Donald Trump (opens in new tab) to deploy the National Guard to his hometown, Marc Benioff — the billionaire Salesforce founder and longtime champion of San Francisco — still had a lot to get off his chest.
Calling from a jet en route to Los Angeles, Benioff spoke at length to The Standard on Friday night about his continuing devotion to the city — even in the face of substantial evidence that he and his family have mostly left it behind.
“No one is doing more philanthropy in San Francisco this year than I am,” Benioff said in an occasionally combative 40-minute interview. “We are the largest philanthropist in San Francisco by the company and individually. Nobody has given more than my family. Nobody has given more than my company.”
“If there is anyone who’s doing more for a local community, I want their name because I’m very competitive and I want to do more than they’re doing,” he added.
But even as he defended himself from a growing backlash to his comments praising Trump, it is hard to deny that Benioff’s relationship with the city has dramatically shifted in the last five years.
A fourth-generation San Franciscan who has for decades cultivated the image of one of tech’s most compassionate capitalists, Benioff has long defended San Francisco against the attacks of other tech billionaires and even fought against them for higher taxes to fund homelessness services. But much of that persona has disappeared in recent years, and the interview with the Times felt like confirmation of a pervading feeling inside the city’s political and philanthropic circles: that Marc Benioff, once dubbed “San Francisco’s giant of generosity (opens in new tab),” is increasingly out of touch with his hometown.
In interviews with more than 15 people in Benioff’s orbit conducted prior to the New York Times bombshell, many described a feeling that the mogul had checked out of San Francisco since the pandemic, both physically and mentally. Instead, his family has increasingly put down roots in Hawaii, where they have amassed a compound of more than 600 acres in recent years.
“[Benioff] used to be the city father of philanthropy,” one political insider told The Standard. “And then when the world changed with the pandemic — honestly, it seemed like it was night and day. He was the first person people were calling to engage, and then he was gone.”
Benioff pushed back forcefully on that idea in his call from the plane, noting his recently announced donation of an additional $100 million to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and calling himself the city’s “largest funder of public health, the largest funder of homelessness, the largest funder of public schools.” He said he hasn’t reduced his amount of time spent in San Francisco and that, in any case, his executive role requires him to spend 75% of his time on the road.
But in an earlier text to The Standard, he did concede one thing: “It’s not a secret I live in Hawaii,” he wrote. “I have been living there on and off for decades.”
‘The People’s Mogul’ goes absent
It is hard to overstate Marc Benioff’s influence on San Francisco. Since leaving Larry Ellison’s Oracle, where he was a senior vice president, to co-found Salesforce in 1999, he has risen to become the city’s largest private employer and one of its largest philanthropists — donating hundreds of millions to its hospitals, parks, universities, and nonprofits.
He has engaged deeply with the city’s politics, speaking regularly with Mayors Ed Lee and London Breed, and almost single-handedly securing the passage of 2018’s Proposition C, the bill implementing the aforementioned tax increase. In 2014, San Francisco Magazine crowned him “The People’s Mogul,” while the Business Times (opens in new tab)dubbed him “the most influential man in San Francisco.”
Benioff was also one of San Francisco’s biggest champions. He spoke frequently in interviews about his family’s 100-year history in the city; about his grandfather, Marvin Lewis, a city supervisor and a driving force behind the creation of BART. On Twitter, he defended the city against critics and urged his fellow tech billionaires to get more involved in giving back to the city that fostered their success. In his memoir, “Trailblazer,” he wrote that he bought the naming rights to Salesforce Tower, San Francisco’s tallest building, as a “powerful statement of loyalty to my hometown,” adding: “We were sending the message that we were here to stay.”
But in recent years, insiders in philanthropy and politics have whispered that the city’s chief cheerleader has felt oddly… absent.
To start with, there is the fact of his growing land holdings in Hawaii. Benioff has maintained a 9,800-square-foot home on the Big Island for decades, but starting in 2020, he began amassing a massive 600-acre compound on the island, rattling residents of the small mountain community where he resides (opens in new tab). In 2021, according to voter roll records obtained by The Standard, Benioff switched his voter registration from California, where he had voted for decades, to Hawaii. Records show he cast his last ballot in California in the 2020 presidential election.
A prominent political strategist on the island said Benioff had developed a close relationship with Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, describing the two men as “friends” and saying they text regularly. Green, notably, is a speaker at this year’s annual Dreamforce conference, which begins Monday in San Francisco. Unlike previous years, the city’s mayor and the governor of California are not on the program. “Benioff is very much a part of Gov. Green’s world at this point,” the strategist said, adding that the governor “relies on Benioff to help out with a lot of initiatives, especially healthcare.”
In exchanges with The Standard, Benioff described himself as “the largest philanthropist in the state of Hawaii” and confirmed being on a texting basis with Green. He also confirmed changing his voter registration, saying he switched it to Hawaii because he wanted to live in a “low-COVID area where things were not closed.”
But even as the world opened up post-Covid, associates in San Francisco still noticed Benioff’s absence. Members of Congregation Emanu-El — a high-profile Jewish temple to which Benioff previously donated so much money that its newly renovated preschool bears his family’s name — said Benioff had not attended holiday services there in years. Benioff said this is because he is now a member of a different congregation in the city, but declined to provide the name, citing security concerns.
At work, Salesforce employees said the CEO increasingly began video-calling into meetings from Hawaii, angering those who were required to go back to the office in San Francisco starting in 2024.
Benioff’s absence was especially stark at City Hall, where he previously maintained a close relationship with Mayors Lee and Breed. The billionaire did not serve alongside another tech mogul, Sam Altman, on Lurie’s transition team, nor did he attend the new mayor’s swearing-in in January. Lurie’s personal calendar, obtained by The Standard, shows no publicly disclosed meetings with Benioff since the mayor took office.
Benioff’s name is also conspicuously absent from Lurie’s many public-private partnerships, like the Partnership for San Francisco — an advisory board packed with the city’s top business leaders, including Altman, Ron Conway, and Jony Ive — and his Downtown Development Corporation, another magnet for local chieftains like Chris Larsen and Bob Fisher. A public records request for any behests of payment from Lurie’s office to Benioff returned no results, suggesting the billionaire had not donated anything personally to Lurie’s efforts, though Salesforce is a donor to the Partnership for San Francisco.
Benioff insisted he speaks to the mayor regularly — “including today,” he told The Standard — and that he had never served on a city advisory board, only donated to its initiatives. Asked why he was not a part of Lurie’s Breaking the Cycle initiative focused on homelessness prevention — a pet cause of Benioff’s — he responded: “I have no idea what this is, and no one has ever mentioned it to me.”
‘It’s too bad we’ve lost him’
One city hall insider said Benioff’s disengagement marked a decided change from years past, when he was a donor to major public-private partnerships, like Lee’s 2016 anti-homelessness initiative and London Breed’s 2018 push to build free housing at a refurbished hotel in the Tenderloin. Five years ago, this person said, “If there was a large civic organization with other major CEOs, Benioff likely not only would have participated — he likely would have been the chair.”
“He did a lot of great stuff in San Francisco, and we need more people like that,” the insider added. “It’s too bad we’ve lost him.”
Benioff, if it wasn’t already clear, does not support this narrative. In his interview with The Standard, Benioff maintained both that he lives in Hawaii and that he doesn’t not live in San Francisco. At one point, he defended his presence in the city by saying, “I don’t think I spend less time in San Francisco, I think I spend time everywhere.” He estimated that he spent 75% of the year on the road, visiting Salesforce offices in Tokyo, Sydney, London, New York, and Atlanta, to name a few.
This, Benioff says, is how he knows the National Guard should be called in to clean up San Francisco, even if he doesn’t live there most of the time.
‘I’ve seen things in San Francisco that need to be directly addressed by police, and if the police cannot address it, then bring in whoever can.’
“I am in the downtowns and in the action of every major metropolitan city,” he said. “So I am able to see more than other people, because I don’t think other people have traveled as much as I’ve traveled. I’ve been everywhere in the world. I’ve been to every country. I’ve been to every city. I’ve met with every CEO and every company on this planet. I’ve met with most presidents.”
In the interview, Benioff repeated his claim that calling in the National Guard was necessary because San Francisco had “defunded the police” and recalled an incident from a month or two prior, when he was driving in the Mission District to see a movie at Alamo Drafthouse and saw what he claimed was “a couple hundred people doing drugs on the street.” (Despite Breed’s calls to reduce the police budget in 2020, the city never took steps to withdraw funding from the SFPD. The department’s budget has steadily increased since then.)
Outraged by what he claimed to have seen, Benioff called Lurie to demand a change.
“I said, ‘What is going on? Why do you not have this cleaned up?” he said. “I think that is a serious safety issue for San Francisco. People are allowed to defecate on the streets, and it has not been directly addressed. It was not directly addressed by the previous mayor. And it needs to be directly addressed by the current mayor. It’s a major situation.”
Benioff said he’d faced increasing pressure in recent years to move Dreamforce, the city’s largest annual conference, to Las Vegas because of security concerns, and that he hires upwards of 200 off-duty California Highway Patrol officers and other cops as additional security each year.
When asked about concerns that Trump could weaponize the National Guard or military against San Francisco residents, he reiterated his view that crime in the city is out of control. “There’s parts of our city that are still incredibly unsafe … If you haven’t been down there, you’ll be scared to be there,” he said. “And if you live in San Francisco, you know that too. I’m speaking the truth. I’ve seen things in San Francisco that need to be directly addressed by police, and if the police cannot address it, then bring in whoever can.”
All of this represents a significant change in tone for the man Politico once called “tech’s woke CEO (opens in new tab),” who a decade ago threatened to pull investments from Indiana over anti-LGBTQ legislation and who offered to relocate employees out of Texas after it passed a restrictive abortion law.
But it is a shift Benioff has been signaling for some time now, starting with his glowing posts about Trump on X last fall, which included fake Time magazine covers praising the president. (The posts deeply disturbed employees at Time, which Benioff owns, The Standard previously reported.)
Benioff did not attend Trump’s inauguration, but did pop up at a dinner the president held with Prince Charles last month (opens in new tab). And in the interview with the Times, he not only praised Trump, saying the president was “doing a great job,” but denied ever being a liberal to begin with, saying he was a longtime Republican before switching to become an independent voter.
Christin Evans, a progressive homelessness activist who worked closely with Benioff on the Prop C campaign, said she started noticing a change in Benioff after the pandemic. Not only was he spending more time in Hawaii, she said, but he seemed increasingly out of touch with local issues — for instance, continuing to insist that San Francisco had defunded its police department, when it had not.
Evans said she resisted criticizing him publicly for years, assuming he was just out of touch, but that his comments about the national guard pushed her to speak out.
“His reckless calls for a federal takeover of San Francisco’s peaceful streets just shows how harmful a billionaire with a megaphone platform can be,” she said. “It appears he’s having a moment where he sees financial opportunity in currying favor with not just Trump, but people who are in Trump’s orbit … It just seems like he’s trying to align himself with where the money is.”
‘When the winds change, he changes’
Multiple people who know Benioff also pointed to recent challenges at Salesforce to explain his apparent change of heart. Starting in 2022, activist investors began taking significant stakes in the company and demanding it cut costs and boost revenue. Benioff was forced to make sweeping cuts, laying off 10% of the company’s staff (opens in new tab) and reducing its office space in the San Francisco Salesforce Tower. His co-CEO, Bret Taylor, stepped down in 2022 after just a year on the job, leading Benioff to helm the company alone.
A former Salesforce executive speculated that these struggles, coupled with the return of the Trump administration, had led Benioff to drop his benevolent billionaire brand for something more profit-driven.
“Marc says the right words until the winds change, and when the winds change, he changes with them,” the former executive said. Right now, he added, that means talking up AI improvements, not shilling for diversity and inclusion or higher taxes on billionaires. “All of the tech CEOs have largely bent the knee [to Trump], in order to do what they perceive is best for their business, and I don’t know if that’s any different for Marc,” he said.
Another executive who previously worked with Benioff had a more sympathetic take, suggesting the billionaire had been hurt by criticism of his work in the city.
“I genuinely think Marc is a good person and he wants to do good for the world,” this person said. “He’s given back to the city, and for it to have at times turned on him or criticized him — he’s only human, you have to remember that. There is a limit to someone’s willingness to help others and yet still continue to be criticized.”
Still, Benioff doesn’t seem keen on giving up the mantle of San Francisco’s biggest benefactor. On Saturday, shortly after he spoke with The Standard, the Chronicle ran a story detailing his $100 million donation to the UCSF children’s hospital and Salesforce’s $39 million donation to groups including the San Francisco Unified School District. Benioff tweeted out the article, noting that he and his company had “now given over $1B to our local children’s hospitals and public schools,” and adding a heart emoji.
On Sunday, as he continued to take heat for his comments to the Times, he announced an additional $1 million donation from Salesforce to the SFPD.
“We’re grateful for the progress Mayor Lurie and all our partners have made, and we look forward to continuing to work together to make our city safe for everyone who lives, works and visits here,” he wrote (opens in new tab).
For the rest of the week, as Dreamforce progresses, Benioff will likely make more sweeping pronouncements and sizable donations. He will reaffirm his commitment to San Francisco. He’ll remind everyone of his family’s long history here. And he’ll declare our city a global AI hub.
And then he will get on his plane and fly away.