TJ Walker critiques Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff for publicly suggesting President Trump send the National Guard to San Francisco, then retracting and apologizing—an action that provoked backlash from city leaders, tech peers, and donors. The speaker situates the episode within a broader pattern of tech billionaires shifting toward accommodating Trump-era power (possible motive: federal contracts and political survival), contrasts Benioff’s prior progressive reputation and philanthropy with his remarks, and expresses ambivalence as a longtime Salesforce customer about whether to cancel services or accept his apology.
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This is where the wind is blowing. Trump can ruin my life. He could ruin my company. So, yes, we will bow down to you, Mr. Trump. Mark Benioff was supposed to be better than that. Salesforce CEO walks back call for Trump's troops in San Francisco. According to the Times, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has apologized after suggesting President Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco. Running up now says he was wrong posting on X that he does not believe the National Guard is needed and that his remarks came out of concern for safety during his company's massive Dreamforce conference. The reversal follows a week of fierce backlash from city leaders and even his friends in tech. Mayor Daniel Lurie, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and District Attorney Brook Jenkins all condemned the idea of bringing in the Guard, calling it unnecessary and dangerous. Venture capitalist Ron Conway quit Benioff's foundation board and Lauren Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs, former wife, accused him of thinking generosity is an auction and policy is the prize. Benioff's comments marked a sharp shift from his progressive image. His company, meanwhile, is pursuing billions of dollars in federal contracts, including with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the Trump administration. Okay, what's the real message here? The message once again, from tech billionaires who are supposed to be so strong and ruling the universe. It's really this. I'm going to bow down to Trump anytime, anywhere. Yes, dear Orange one, you are master. I am your serf. That's what Benioff was doing, but he realized it's not working for everyone. It's not going to work for him. Okay, a little. A little context. Obviously, there are a lot of big tech billionaires who are enthusiastic about Donald Trump and have been for at least a few years. People like Elon Musk. Marc Benioff was supposed to be one of the good ones, though there are awful lot of, you know, the Peter Thiels of the world. People are like, I'm a libertarian and I read one book in my life by Ayn Rand and now I'm a philosopher king. And government's always bad, except when it created the Internet. And they have willingly endorsed and supported and showered praise on, on to Elon Musk. There's a whole nother category of people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who have not historically been very political and if anything, were sort of more seen as on the progressive Democratic side. But they're like, this is where the wind is blowing. Trump could ruin my life. He could ruin my company. So, yes, we will bow down to you, Mr. Trump. Marc Benioff was supposed to be better than that. He's known as, frankly, someone very bad, very progressive, liberal, if you want to use that term. A supporter of Democrats for a long time, he's seen as an extraordinarily charitable person. And I don't mean just giving money to libertarian media nonprofits. I mean real charity. And he was highly respected in San Francisco. And he kind of threw that all away in the last week with his article essentially saying, you know, crime's out of control in San Francisco. Crime is true. Dramatically lower than it's been in years in San Francisco. And then to be someone seen as such a supporter of San Francisco as he has been a leader, someone who built the tallest building in San Francisco, who's a part of so many charities of San Francisco, to then essentially say, the political leaders of San Francisco are incompetent, let's bring in National Guard and use the military against our own citizens and which is patently unconstitutional. It struck a lot of people as ridiculous. I have to tell you. On a personal note, I've been a customer of Salesforce for probably a decade. I'm a little bit torn. There's a part of me who would like to send a real message and cancel my subscription to Salesforce, but there's another part of me that says, okay, he apologized, he admitted he's wrong. And one of the big criticisms, legitimate criticisms of people in the left, even though I'm a sane, sensible centrist, one of the criticisms of people on the left is somebody makes a mistake, admits it, says they want to change, people on the left are like, no, you're canceled forever. You're always a bad person. No one can ever deal with you again. No, the whole desire, the whole goal of public debate, intellectual exchange is you want to convert people to your cause. If someone was. If you're a gay rights activist and someone was. Is anti gay marriage, and then they say, okay, I've changed my mind. I'm now for gay marriage and I'm going to vote that way. You don't then say, oh, but you're always going to be a homophobe and you're always bad, bad, and no one can ever support you. That's not productive. That it goes very much against the whole notion of political debate and politics itself. So I don't want to be guilty of that. I'm going to have to give this more thought. Now, let's remember, Benioff already struck many people as very different from the average Silicon Valley billionaire. He supported Hillary Clinton. He supported. He Supported homeless funding, taxes. He, he's done a lot of good. He's known as an extraordinarily generous benefactor of San Francisco. And to then say, call in the National Guard because he went down a bad street in the Tenderloin district just struck a lot of people as bizarre. And now he's trying to essentially rebrand himself. He's been, let's face it, he's been basically a liberal Democrat for most of his public life. He's supporting Hillary Clinton, supporting homeless taxes. That's right, taxes. Which makes him anathema to the modern Republican Party. He supported taxing to help homeless people, which really makes him an anathema. He's now praising Trump and calling himself an independent. And it does make you wonder, is it just the pressure of, he wants those ICE contracts for Salesforce not enough to be a billionaire, but I gotta have another billion and another billion. The other thing that was odd about his defense, he was basically saying, well, I haven't followed all the news. He owns Time magazine now. I personally don't know anyone who's read Time magazine in years, but still, he is a news owner, he owns the news. So it's simply not credible for him to act like, well, I don't really know what's going on here. He's a savvy, smart guy by all accounts, and he's done some good things with Time magazine. He certainly didn't turn it into a right wing rag. He didn't turn it into Newsmax version 3.0. He made it survive. It would be dead without him. And to claim he's not really following the news. Again, the news is crime is down in San Francisco. Is it perfect? No. Is there too much crime? Sure. But proportionally there's more crime in Congressman Mike Johnson's district in Louisiana. And yet for some reason we never hear talk of the National Guard from Chicago, from Illinois being sent to Louisiana to Mark, to Mike Johnson's district. I wonder why that is. Let's take a look at some of your comments. SSB says, I think all major cities and all 50 states are getting troops eventually. I'm going to disagree with you. I think very strategic and select. I think Trump will only send troops to places that are under control by Democrats because it's a pretext to having troops there on election day so that Trump can scare away possible Democratic voters. And that way, if there's a close election, his team will have a lot more votes. So that's what I see. SSB also, 90s was way worse for crime? Well, absolutely. In 1990, New York City had more than 2,000 thousand murders and today it's several hundred. Do I wish it didn't have several hundred? Sure. But compared to 2000. So it's a, it's a very odd thing. It's a very difficult thing for non conservatives to talk about in the media because once you're talking about crime, it activates these neurons and people they, oh, crime, crime, crime. Who's the toughest on crime? It's going to be the MAGA guy with the, with the machine gun. And the problem is the facts don't bear it out as crime has gone steadily down, not consistently every month. There were some blips up during the pandemic. But in general, crime has gone steadily down in the United States, big cities, especially for the last 30 years. But news coverage of crime has gone steadily up. Therefore people's perception of crime is that it just goes up, up, up. Sally says, imagine calling for troops to clean your city, then realizing you're the problem money can't solve. Thanks for sharing those comments. We've got a lot more to come. Let me share a couple more facts on this one story. Lauren Powell Jobs accused Benioff of auctioning policy influence, basically saying, hey, you know, you're changing your tune because you want money, you want big time contracts from Trump. And he's known to dole those out only to partisans. Okay, we're going to move on. There's lots more to come today and I got to get out of here early because I'm headed, it's Saturday morning. I'm headed to no Kings Day, the no Kings protest. I hope you show up for that as well.
