Marc Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. Benioff is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of ''Time'' magazine since 2018.

Early life and education

Marc Russell Benioff was born on September 25, 1964, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the grandson of Marvin Lewis, a California trial attorney and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who championed the creation of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Benioff grew up in Hillsborough and graduated from Burlingame High School in 1982. Benioff received a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Southern California, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, in 1986.

Career

While in high school, Benioff sold his first application, How to Juggle, for $75. In 1979, when he was 15, Benioff founded Liberty Software, creating and selling games such as ''Flapper'' and ''King Arthur's Heir'' for the Atari 8-bit. Royalties from these games helped Benioff pay for college.

While at USC, Benioff had an internship as a programmer at Apple where he wrote assembly code for the Macintosh. He joined Oracle Corporation in a customer-service role after graduating. Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in a variety of sales, marketing, and product development roles. At 23, he was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year, and later became the youngest vice president in the company's history.

Salesforce

Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, while working from a San Francisco apartment. He defined its mission in a marketing statement as "The End of Software." This was a slogan he frequently used to preach about software on the Web; it was used too as a guerilla marketing tactic against the dominant CD-ROM-based customer relationship management (CRM) software provider at the time, Siebel. Benioff extended Salesforce's offerings in the early 2000s with the idea of a platform that allowed developers to create applications.

In November 2021, Benioff became co-CEO of Salesforce when Bret Taylor's promotion to co-CEO was announced. One year later, Bret Taylor stepped down as Salesforce co-CEO, leaving Marc Benioff as sole CEO again.

In January 2023 Benioff announced the mass dismissal of approximately 7,000 Salesforce employees via a two-hour all-hands meeting over a call, a course of action he later admitted had been a 'bad idea'. As of 2024, Salesforce is one of the biggest employers in San Francisco and the anchor tenant of Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco.

Time magazine

On September 16, 2018, Marc and his wife Lynne bought ''Time'' for $190 million. In 2019, Benioff started Time Ventures, a venture capital fund that has invested in multiple companies, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Universal Hydrogen and NCX. In 2021, two companies Time Venture backed, Planet Labs and IonQ, went public.

Other work

Benioff is on the World Economic Forum's board of trustees and USC board of trustees. Benioff is a member of the Business Roundtable, an advocacy group of CEOs, and the Business Council. As of February 2022, Benioff had an estimated net worth of US$8.31 billion according to ''Bloomberg Billionaires Index''.

Co-written work

Benioff has co-written four books about business and technology. In 2004, he co-wrote ''Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well'' with Karen Southwick. In 2006, he co-wrote ''The Business of Changing the World: 20 Great Leaders on Strategic Corporate Philanthropy'' with Carlye Adler. In 2009, he co-wrote ''Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry'', also with Carlye Adler. In 2019, he again co-wrote ''Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change'', with Monica Langley. The book became a ''New York Times'' bestseller.

Recognition

In 2003, President George W. Bush appointed Benioff co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. In 2009, Benioff was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and is a member of its board of trustees. In 2012, he was named one of the "Best CEOs in the World" by '' Barron''s and received ''The Economist''s Innovation Award. In 2014, ''Fortune'' readers voted him "Businessperson of the Year." In 2016, ''Fortune'' named him one of the "World's 50 Greatest Leaders." In 2019, he was recognized as one of the 10 Best-Performing CEOs by ''Harvard Business Review'', and was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Benioff was named CNN Business CEO of 2020,and was ''Chief Executive'''s CEO of the Year in 2022.

He was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 2022.He was also named to The Chronicles of Philanthropy’s Top 50 list for the 10th time in 2024.

Philanthropy

In addition to founding Salesforce in 1999, Benioff also founded the Salesforce Foundation. The foundation uses a "1-1-1" approach to corporate philanthropy, where the company gives one percent of employee time as volunteer hours, one percent of its product and one percent of its revenue to charitable causes.

From 2010 to 2019, the Benioffs donated a total of $275 million to UCSF Children's Hospital, to fund research, and to create the UCSF Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine. They have also donated $10 million to Stanford University for the Microbiome Therapies Initiative, and $35 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to establish a prostate cancer research initiative.

Since 2016, Benioff has donated over $80 million as part of the Benioff Ocean Science Initiative at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In January 2020, Benioff announced that he and his wife would provide financial backing for 1t.org to support a global initiative to plant and conserve 1 trillion trees over the next decade.

Benioff procured 50 million pieces of personal protective equipment for hospitals and COVID-19 first responders in the United States in March 2020.

The Benioffs were founding partners of Prince William's Earthshot Prize. In 2021, they were founding members of the World Economic Forum's Friends of Ocean Action initiative, and later pledged $300 million donation to plant trees and fund ecologically focused entrepreneurs.The Benioffs  also pledged $12 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation over a five-year period (2022-2027) to support cleanup of the Midway Atoll.

Social activism

Abortion

In September 2021, Benioff announced that Salesforce would relocate any Texas employees who wanted to move after an abortion law went into effect.

LGBTQ issues

In March 2015, Benioff announced Salesforce would cancel all employee programs and travel in Indiana after the passing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This led to a revised version of the bill being signed into law that prohibited businesses from denying services to someone based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

In February 2016, Benioff announced that Salesforce would reduce investments in Georgia and cancel a conference if HB 757, a bill that would allow businesses to decline services to same-sex couples, was passed. The governor vetoed the bill.

Gender pay gap

In April 2015, after the issue was raised by Salesforce chief personnel officer Cindy Robbins, Benioff announced that he would review salaries at Salesforce to ensure men and women were paid equally. He subsequently dedicated $8 million between 2015 and 2017 to “correct compensation differences by gender, race, and ethnicity across the company”.

Homelessness

In an October 2018 interview with ''The Guardian'', Benioff criticized other technology industry executives for "hoarding" their money and refusing to help the homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2019, the Benioffs donated $30 million to the Center for Vulnerable Populations for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative to study the impacts of homelessness, housing, and health.

In July 2023, Benioff stated that San Francisco "will never go back to the way it was before the pandemic" and recommended that city leadership convert old office space into housing and hire more police. He used his platform on X to call for “refunding the police” numerous times in 2023.

Personal life

Benioff is married to Lynne Benioff and has two children. The family lives in San Francisco, California. He is a second cousin of showrunner and television writer David Benioff, known for ''Game of Thrones'', and Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp.

A 2024 investigation by NPR journalist Dara Kerr found that Benioff has purchased more than 600 acres of land in Hawaii, mostly near the town of Waimea on Big Island. Benioff's purchases, which totaled $24.5 million as of February 2024, have sparked concern among Waimea locals regarding rising housing prices.

According to a Benioff spokesperson, the Benioffs have given away nearly 75 percent of the land they've purchased in Hawaii as of March 2024, including a total of 440 acres to the non-profit Hawaii Island Community Development Corporation. In March, Benioff donated $150 million to a group of Hawaii medical organizations to build additional facilities and to link the Hawaii Pacific Health system with other local hospitals.

References

Further reading

*

External links

Official company biography

{{DEFAULTSORT:Benioff, Marc
1964 births
Living people
Salesforce people
20th-century American businesspeople
21st-century American businesspeople
American billionaires
American computer programmers
American Internet company founders
American software engineers
American technology chief executives
American technology writers
Apple Inc. employees
Businesspeople from San Francisco
American LGBTQ rights activists
Oracle employees
People from Burlingame, California
Marshall School of Business alumni
Writers from San Francisco
21st-century American philanthropists
Knights of the Legion of Honour
American recipients of the Legion of Honour