Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff issued a mea culpa Friday, retracting his eyebrow-raising suggestion that President Donald Trump deploy National Guard troops to San Francisco—just days before his company’s glitzy Dreamforce conference was set to dazzle the tech world with keynotes and kale smoothies.
The apology, posted on X (formerly Twitter, because rebrands are so last year), came after a week of social media storms that made even the foggiest Bay Area morning look clear by comparison.
Benioff, the cloud-computing wizard whose empire powers everything from corporate spreadsheets to your uncle’s fantasy football league, had innocently floated the Guard idea as a “precaution” for Dreamforce security. Little did he know, it would summon a backlash fiercer than a startup pitch gone wrong.
“Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans,” Benioff wrote, “I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco.” Translation: Even in a city where parking spots are guarded like state secrets, tanks might be a tad overkill.
The timing couldn’t have been more exquisitely awkward. Trump’s administration has been playing whack-a-mole with military deployments to Democratic strongholds, from Portland’s protest parades to Los Angeles’s traffic jams reimagined as civil unrest. On Friday, Trump beseeched the Supreme Court to greenlight Guard troops in Chicago, where lower courts balked, citing a pesky lack of “rebellion” and fears of fanning flames hotter than a viral meme.
Meanwhile, Dreamforce—usually a utopia of innovation booths and overpriced lattes—limped along like a unicorn with a sprained hoof. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie ghosted his scheduled appearance, while comedians Kumail Nanjiani and Ilana Glazer bailed faster than a buggy software update.
One attendee quipped it felt less like a conference and more like a group therapy session for jilted tech bros.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who once shared a stage with Benioff like old conference pals, fired off a rebuke that stung sharper than a failed acquisition deal. “San Francisco doesn’t need olive drab cosplay to solve its problems,” Newsom might as well have tweeted, though he kept it classy.
Venture capitalist Ron Conway, a Salesforce Foundation stalwart, tendered his resignation with the flair of a dramatic exit stage left. “I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” he lamented to The New York Times, sounding like a spurned fan after a celebrity tweetstorm.
Their values, he said, were “no longer aligned”—a polite way of saying, “Marc, we’re not in the same LinkedIn network anymore.”
Benioff doubled down on contrition. “I remain deeply grateful to Mayor Lurie, SFPD, and all our partners,” he posted, pledging fealty to a “safer, stronger San Francisco.” His original endorsement? Born of “abundance of caution,” like suggesting armored vests for a yoga retreat.
Sylvia Paull, a grizzled Silicon Valley publicist who’s seen more CEO flubs than free apps in the Play Store, pegged Benioff as your garden-variety tech titan: not a political savant, but a “transactional” operator whose gaffes threaten the bottom line. “It was going to hurt his sales,” she noted dryly.
And legacy? “He’s afraid he’s going to lose his.” Ouch—because nothing says “immortal innovator” like owning Time magazine and a hospital wing named after you.
Benioff’s civic resume is thicker than a stack of unread TPS reports: He bankrolled a 2018 ballot measure hiking corporate taxes for homeless aid, which squeaked by despite the grumbles. He hosted a swanky fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet cozied up to Trump during the president’s London jaunt last month. Eclectic? Or just hedging bets like a diversified portfolio?
Trump dubbed San Francisco “a mess” Wednesday, slotting it next on his Guard deployment bingo card. In Chicago, Illinois officials sued to fend off the intrusion, arguing it trampled state sovereignty like an uninvited algorithm crashing your feed.
Adding fuel to this farce, The New York Times revealed Salesforce hawking its wares to ICE amid their hiring spree for immigration crackdowns—because nothing pairs better with cloud storage than border enforcement software. Cozy, or just capitalism’s cold calculus?
Tech whisperer David Sacks, a Trump ally and Silicon Valley survivor, lobbed a lifeline via X: “If the Democrats don’t want you, we would be happy for you to join our team.” Benioff, politely mum, left us wondering: Will he pivot to the dark side, or stick to safer shores like quantum computing and quinoa bowls?
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