Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who delivered the keynote address at the 2025 Dreamforce conference, said Friday: “I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco.”
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
A group of Salesforce workers wrote that CEO Marc Benioff’s support for sending National Guard troops to patrol San Francisco’s streets represented “a troubling hypocrisy.” He retracted the comments Friday.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
It was supposed to be a good week for Marc Benioff. The Salesforce CEO would be joined by tens of thousands of his software’s devotees descending on San Francisco for his beloved Dreamforce conference. There would be performances by popular comedians and a charity concert by Metallica at Chase Center benefiting the children’s hospital bearing his name.
But rather than having his place as a great benefactor of the city celebrated, by Friday, the CEO of San Francisco’s largest private employer found himself criticized so heavily that he retracted comments he made to the New York Times in support of sending the National Guard to the city.
“Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he wrote on X. “My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused.”
Article continues below this ad
Benioff did not respond to requests for comment from the Chronicle on Friday.
The reversal came only after Benioff had been deserted by a close friend, upbraided by a parade of local leaders and blasted by rank-and-file Salesforce employees over the comment, which they said represented a betrayal of the company’s professed values. The capitulation is the first time a tech leader’s public support of President Donald Trump and his controversial policies, embodied by the phalanx of familiar faces that attended his inauguration in January, backfired so spectacularly.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Sundar Pichai of Google were among the tech luminaries who joined Tesla’s Elon Musk at President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Getty Images
Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the world’s preeminent philanthropists, had excoriated Benioff for his remarks earlier in the day.
“When wealth becomes a substitute for participation, giving is reduced to performance art — proof of virtue, a way to appear magnanimous while still demanding ownership,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “That’s the quiet corruption corroding modern philanthropy: the ability to give as a license to impose one’s will. It’s a kind of moral laundering, where so-called benevolence masks self-interest.”
Article continues below this ad
Benioff is one of San Francisco’s top philanthropists. His family and Salesforce have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes, and he has supported local measures to fund public schools and statewide measures to fund children’s hospitals and end the death penalty. He has identified himself as a “compassionate capitalist.”
But his relationship with San Francisco, critics say, has grown more tenuous. He conceded to the San Francisco Standard that he does not live in the city and has called Hawaii home “on and off for decades.”
On a call from his private plane en route to Dreamforce, Benioff told the Times he supports Trump. “I think he’s doing a great job,” he said. He complained that he needed to hire private police for Dreamforce and that the National Guard could help reduce crime in the city. “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said. Any attempt to use troops for law enforcement would violate federal law.
The suggestion sparked immediate backlash from Bay Area progressives and put local politicians in a defensive posture. Just as lanyard-wearing Dreamforce attendees arrived downtown, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins held a news conference, insisting that troops would be unwarranted and unwelcome. They touted increases in police spending coinciding with a decline in crime.
Ron Conway, a close friend of Benioff’s for decades, announced he was stepping down from the board of the Salesforce Foundation on Thursday. He told the Times their values no longer aligned.
Article continues below this ad
Venture capitalist Ron Conway, left, speaks with Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff before the 2018 grand opening of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.
Mercury News/MediaNews Group/Getty Images
In an open letter published online, a group of Salesforce workers, alumni and community members said Benioff’s latest positions represent “a troubling hypocrisy.” More than 180 people had signed on to the letter as of Friday evening.
But Benioff’s remarks were cheered by conservatives who over the years have denigrated the city and inaccurately portrayed it as rife with violence.
Elon Musk quickly backed Benioff’s initial National Guard comments. “It’s the only solution at this point,” Musk wrote Sunday on X, the social media platform he owns. “Nothing else has or will work.”
David Sacks, the conservative venture capitalist who is Trump’s AI and crypto czar and who spoke with Benioff as a “very special guest” Tuesday at Dreamforce, cheered on the CEO’s rightward turn in a post on X Thursday. “If the Democrats don’t want you, we would be happy for you to join our team. Cancel culture is over, and we are the inclusive party,” he wrote.
Article continues below this ad
Trump, too, took notice. He appeared to reference Benioff’s National Guard remarks when he spoke to reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office, saying “we have great support in San Francisco” for sending troops to the city, and urged FBI Director Kash Patel to make San Francisco “next” in line for an invasion.
Over the past two decades, Benioff has given money to politicians and causes on both sides of the aisle, but most of his larger and more recent donations have been to Democratic Party committees. He donated to Democrats Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris in their statewide campaigns.
Last April, he was seen having dinner in San Francisco with former President Barack Obama.
In a lengthy news release Wednesday, Newsom, who is close to Benioff, did not name the CEO or criticize him directly, but provided an extensive rundown of crime statistics showing San Francisco’s progress in improving public safety.
As backlash mounted, Benioff pledged that Salesforce would invest $15 billion in San Francisco over the next five years.
Article continues below this ad
Many others in the political and philanthropic worlds declined to speak on the record about Benioff, fearful that he might end his financial donations.
Perhaps most telling was Lurie’s Instagram feed. Almost daily, Lurie posts videos of his interactions with local merchants or at local events, almost always in the name of talking up San Francisco’s “comeback.” He didn’t post anything about Dreamforce as it was taking place.
Thousands listen to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff give the keynote address Tuesday during the Dreamforce conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
At the news conference denouncing Benioff’s comments, Lurie said he’d spoken with Benioff recently but declined to provide any details. Politically, Lurie is likely to fear alienating Benioff, whose support he will need to pass upcoming ballot measures funding public transit in the city.
Benioff’s rough week came during a critical time for Salesforce, which like most companies faces competition from AI startups seeking to peel away its customers, so much so that the overwhelming theme of Dreamforce was to tout the company’s new AI capabilities. Salesforce stock is down by more than a third since reaching a 52-week high 10 months ago and was down 1% on the day Friday.
A few weeks ago, Salesforce announced a new line of business, Missionforce, to garner more revenue from defense, intelligence and aerospace agencies, following other tech companies that have been criticized by employees for doing much the same thing. And the New York Times reported Thursday on Salesforce’s efforts to help the Trump administration bolster Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s capabilities as it seeks to deport millions of immigrants. Those efforts have so far ensnared hundreds of U.S. citizens, including in California.
Salesforce is also seeking regulatory approval for its proposed $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, an AI-powered cloud data management company that it bought last May.
“If you look at that (stock) drop, it is dropped by a third, a third,” said former San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who said he has met Benioff a few times. “Now you don’t have to be an AI computer to know that Salesforce has not been able to get into the AI space as aggressively and quickly as they touted that they were going to. My guess is that at some point Benioff said ‘Holy s—, I need to get my snout now into Donald Trump’s trough,’ and the best way to do that is what every prime minister all around the world figured out, Tim Cook figured out: show up and kiss his ass and give him a golden iPad and then at a minimum he won’t hurt you and at a maximum give you the keys to a defense contract kingdom. That’s what I think happened.”
This is not the first time Benioff has complained publicly about crime in the city. He continues to repeat the false assertion that San Francisco has “defunded” the police and has said the city needs 1,000 more officers. But a Chronicle analysis in 2022 found San Francisco is one of the most highly policed cities in California, according to FBI data.
In 2023, he threatened to relocate Dreamforce to Las Vegas over concerns about drug use, crime and homelessness.
But last year Benioff committed Dreamforce to San Francisco for another three years, some much needed good news for the city’s convention business, which has dropped since the pandemic.
“He has been a tremendous benefactor of philanthropic causes in San Francisco, especially in regard to health care. What he and Salesforce are doing in that regard is extremely important to the well-being of the city,” said Advance SF President Wade Rose, who has spent recent years working to turn the city’s flailing image around.
Rose acknowledged that problems persist but called federal intervention “unnecessary.”
“Statistics, which the mayor continues to point to and people in San Francisco are experiencing, demonstrate that we are in a better place in regard to public safety than we have been in decades. That is important to recognize as well,” Rose said. “The trend is solid. … We have to be careful not to do anything that would get in the way of the city’s recovery from the pandemic.”
Late Friday afternoon, hours after Benioff’s reversal, Lurie also changed his tune. “Dreamforce brought more than 45,000 people into San Francisco, and it was a public safety success,” he wrote on X. “This didn’t happen by accident — it happened because of our planning and partnership across our public safety and city departments that made sure San Francisco shined.”
Harsha Devulapalli contributed to this report.
