Marc Benioff Sticks Foot In His Mouth Again Making Jokes About ICE, Wisecracks Over Employees Getting Arrested
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made the exceedingly unwise decision to kid his international employees that they might be arrested by ICE, and boy did that joke not land whilst he was addressing a company event.
It seems like just yesterday (it was right before Dreamforce) that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff did an overnight San Francisco villain turn when declaring that National Guard agents should be deployed to San Francisco to carry out some Trumpy law-and-order shit. His employees were irate and he walked the comments back, and apparently even helped talk Trump out of a full federal agent surge that Trump was planning here. So it seems like Benioff learned his lesson on that one, right?
Apparently not. KRON4 reports that Benioff was cracking cruel jokes about ICE while addressing employees at the annual Salesforce Company Kickoff leadership conference in Las Vegas. The jokes were apparently at the expense of Salesforce international employees, who were unlikely to have been amused by the notion that ICE could throw them in prison. (Because ICE could!)
We don’t know the exact wording of the joke Benioff cracked. Wired reports on the general gist of the joke, which is that “Benioff asked international employees to stand to thank them for attending. He then joked that ICE agents were in the building monitoring them.”
But we do know exactly how Salesforce employees are responding, as their Slack messages are leaking to the press like mad. “I’m deeply disappointed and uncomfortable that two jokes about ICE were made in the first few minutes of Marc’s opening keynote,” said one message unearthed by Business Insider. “The fact that the first was made after welcoming our teammates who traveled from outside the US? Even worse.”
For what it’s worth, Wired says that Salesforce employees are circulating an open company letter demanding that Benioff stop selling Salesforce products to ICE and denounce ICE and their current conduct. It’s unclear how many signatures the letter has, or how widely circulated it is.
Image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 24: Marc Benioff attends the 2023 TIME100 Next event at Second Floor on October 24, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for TIME)
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