What Happened to the Salesforce CEO?

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00:00Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff has spent $1 billion and decades crafting his image as a benevolent

00:06tech CEO. He just torched it for one person, Donald Trump. In what should have been a boring

00:10interview with the New York Times, Benioff said he was all for Trump sending the National Guard

00:15to San Francisco. He spoke of the need to refund the SF police force, even though it was never

00:20defunded and crime in the city is at its lowest level in decades. That is quite a turnaround

00:26for someone known for saying, just come together as one Ohana. And it's more than the standard

00:31bootlicking most tech CEOs have done to curry favor with the president. Although Benioff has done some

00:36of that too. He said he thought Trump had been doing a great job, even though he admitted he doesn't know

00:42what the president is actually doing. He said he had not closely followed the news about immigration

00:46raids, Trump's gerrymandering push, the government shutdown, or his attacks on the press, even though

00:51he and his wife Lynn owned Time Magazine. The whole thing was just a complete self-own.

00:56Benioff's reversal is especially depressing because his do-goodism seemed sincere. He once

01:02pushed for an increase in corporate taxes to fight homelessness in San Francisco and called for social

01:07media to be regulated like cigarettes. He canceled company events in Indiana after the state passed

01:14anti-LGBTQ legislation and said he would move employees out of Texas after the passage of its

01:19anti-abortion law. But in his Times interview, Benioff claimed to have never been progressive. He's now

01:23kissed Trump's ring just like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sam Altman. After intense blowback, Benioff

01:28did apologize for his National Guard comments and walk them back. But he's learned a hard lesson, that you

01:33can't successfully play both sides. And that's something the old Benioff seemed to know.