Days after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sparked a firestorm by calling for the deployment of the National Guard to San Francisco (opens in new tab), he completely avoided the topic of politics in favor of “agentic AI” during a Q&A session with the media Tuesday at the company’s annual Dreamforce mega-conference.
That stance lasted almost exactly three hours. In the afternoon, Benioff invited White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks on stage as a special guest to discuss his career, including working with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and, of course, his current boss, Donald Trump.
“I’m so excited to have you at Dreamforce, because your life has taken a huge right turn,” Benioff said in his welcome comments to Sacks, whom he described as a “longtime friend” he’s spent “late nights in my kitchen drinking bourbon” with. “Are you sure it wasn’t a left turn?” Sacks quipped. “No, I’m pretty sure it was not,” Benioff responded.
The CEO went on to fawningly ask Sacks about how he aligned himself with the Trump camp to become “ambassador of Silicon Valley to D.C.” He praised the executive for his ability to “add value” while advising Trump on AI and crypto policy. “It’s hard to believe everything that you’ve accomplished in just 12 months now,” he said.
While Benioff didn’t discuss his personal views on the president, whom Sacks described as “an indispensable figure in effecting the political change that we needed in this country,” the whole conversation amounted to a more full-throated endorsement of Trump than Benioff was willing to give earlier in the day.
Around lunchtime, reporters had crammed into a media briefing room, many hoping to ask Benioff about his comments on Trump and the National Guard. But he quickly shut down the first political question, which included his stance on Trump’s policies around H-1B visas (opens in new tab) and free speech.
“I’m going to limit my comments today to Dreamforce and to AgentForce,” he said.
He went on to repeat his comments about keeping conference attendees in San Francisco safe and how Salesforce had hired additional law enforcement agents to staff the event.
“I want to make sure you have a safe experience here — especially everyone here who’s from out of town. That’s why we have brought in over 200 of our own police to make sure that everyone who attends Dreamforce has a good experience,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to make this a safe experience.”
In a conversation with The Standard on Friday, Benioff reiterated that San Francisco was plagued by crime, which he falsely claimed was because the city had defunded the police.
Crime in the city is down across nearly every category. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Department’s budget has steadily increased since 2020. (Notably, most of the police officers that The Standard observed around Dreamforce seemed to be scrolling on their phones.)
Despite once being dubbed “tech’s woke CEO, (opens in new tab)” Benioff also denied that he was ever liberal, asserting that he was a longtime Republican before switching to become an independent voter (he’s now registered in Hawaii, not California).
Dreamforce attendees, for their part, were reluctant to discuss Benioff’s rightward swing, though some expressed skepticism of his call for the National Guard to come to San Francisco. Multiple out-of-state visitors praised the city’s recent glow-up and said they felt safe.
Keegan Otter, (opens in new tab) the chief revenue officer of Seattle-based startup Warmly, who has been attending Dreamforce for years, said the city seems cleaner and “more alive” than it has in his past visits.
“I’ve seen how it went downhill and how it’s really rebounded,” he said. He said he hadn’t seen Benioff’s comments about the National Guard, and was surprised when he was told about them.
“There’s a difference between the CEO of a billion-dollar company’s perspective and that of the city, I’ll say that,” he said. “That’s not a Marc Benioff call. I’d talk to your local PD chief and see how he feels.”