SAN FRANCISCO >> For years, San Franciscans considered him their benevolent, bighearted billionaire.
While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.
But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0.
The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Donald Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale.
Benioff’s shift serves as another example of a prominent Bay Area tech executive acceding to the Republican president’s view of the world. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave Trump a 24-karat gold gift and heaped praise upon the president in an August visit to the Oval Office. Last month, at a White House dinner for tech barons, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Trump he was “a very refreshing change.”
To many Silicon Valley observers, such attempts to accommodate Trump are simply a matter of protecting tech businesses, especially after watching Trump threaten companies, individuals and institutions that have run afoul of him. And Salesforce has hundreds of software contracts with the federal government.
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Nearly nine months into Trump’s second term, San Francisco has avoided the heavy federal incursions seen in Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago. The most palpable action in the city has involved agents arresting immigrants at the federal courthouse, sometimes in aggressive ways.
But the president, in an Oval Office gathering in August, mentioned that he was considering sending federal troops into San Francisco as he ticked off a list of other Democratic-led cities. He said that Democrats had “destroyed” San Francisco and that he would “clean that one up, too.”
Benioff said he liked that idea and thought that National Guard soldiers 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.
Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of “agentic enterprise,” a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together.
Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police.
The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Benioff says it needs another thousand.
“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.”
Benioff’s team wanted him to highlight his latest round of philanthropy, which includes another personal donation of $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco children’s hospitals named after him, as well as a $39 million company gift to schools and children’s causes. His family and company have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes over the past 26 years.
“I don’t think anyone has hired more people or given more money or supported San Francisco more than I have,” Benioff said.
Since the pandemic, he has mostly lived on Hawaii island, where he has bought up numerous parcels of land. He said that he wasn’t sure how many days he spends each year in San Francisco, but that he is never in one place for more than a day or two.
Mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat who avoids discussing national politics or even saying the president’s name, did not address Benioff’s view that Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco. In a statement, his spokesperson highlighted the city’s falling crime rates and increased hiring of law enforcement officers.
Other San Francisco politicians rebuked Benioff.
“You can’t support San Francisco and want to see us invaded,” said Assembly member Matt Haney, a Democrat. “It’s one thing to wrongly support Trump’s misguided economic policies. It’s quite another to support a direct assault and occupation of our city.”
Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, was livid that Benioff wanted the National Guard in the city. She would seek to prosecute anyone, including federal agents, who becomes violent or harasses residents, she said.
“San Franciscans right now sit scared that we are next in line for what Trump is delivering to other cities across this nation,” Jenkins said. “I’m disappointed that anyone would want to invite that chaos into our city.”
Rafael Mandelman, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said he agreed that the city needs more police officers, but said there was no need to send federal troops. He said he understood why so many tech leaders were turned off by the swing further left in the city five years ago, but said that they were moving too far to the right.
“I really don’t think Trump is the answer,” he said.
Though San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have elected more moderate leaders in recent years, they remain staunchly Democratic and oppose Trump. A Public Policy Institute of California poll in June found that 77% of likely voters in the Bay Area disapproved of Trump, the highest share for any region in the state.
But over the course of a 50-minute conversation, Benioff did not have a negative word to say about Trump or his policies.
“I fully support the president,” he said. “I think he’s doing a great job.”
During the interview, Trump’s voice could be heard in the background. Benioff was watching a YouTube video about the Israeli hostage release deal, for which he praised the president.
Benioff is close enough to Trump to have been invited last month to a state dinner that was hosted by King Charles for the president at Windsor Castle in England. Benioff said that he was incredibly honored to be seated directly across the table from Trump and spent the dinner telling him “how grateful I am for everything he’s doing,” he recounted.
Benioff, who also owns Time magazine, said he had not closely followed the news about the immigration raids, Trump’s call to gerrymander congressional districts before the midterm elections, the government shutdown or the Trump administration’s attacks on the media. He said Time, which named Trump its “Person of the Year” last year, had faced no pressure from the White House.
“We haven’t been under attack,” he said. “We provide accurate, balanced journalism.”
He praised Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to slash federal spending, texting a recent photo of himself hanging out with Musk and a Tesla robot. He likewise praised David Sacks, another San Francisco tech billionaire and the chair of Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
It all seemed to be a major political shift for Benioff. In 2016, he hosted a large fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Trump, at his $31 million mansion on the edge of the Presidio in San Francisco.
In 2018, Benioff personally funded a city ballot measure campaign to tax businesses, including his own, for services for those who are homeless.
When he cut the ribbon that same year to open Salesforce Tower, a rocket-shaped building that consumed the city skyline, he asked the head of a local meditation center to lead the crowd in chanting “Om, shanti,” a Sanskrit call for peace, and called on his fellow tech leaders do more to combat poverty.
Myrna Melgar, a San Francisco supervisor, said that Benioff’s comments about the National Guard and Trump “threw me for a loop.” She speculated that his political shift might be for self-serving business reasons.
“From the railroad barons until now, that’s nothing new,” she said. “But with Marc Benioff, it’s particularly disappointing. It’s definitely out of step and out of touch with what most San Franciscans would want.”
On Thursday, Benioff said he had never been progressive even if many San Franciscans thought he was. He said he was a longtime Republican before switching to become an independent voter.
At the end of the interview, he turned to a public relations executive. He could be heard asking why her mouth was wide open and if he had said anything he shouldn’t have.
“What about the political questions?” he asked. “Too spicy?”
Then he hung up.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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