We need only follow the money to figure out what has turned the once-liberal-leaning Marc Benioff into a full-throated Trump supporter. And now we see that Salesforce was hoping to land a new contract helping ICE to expand its reach.
It’s now been a full week since billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made it known that he “fully supports” President Trump and thinks he’s doing a “great job.” And he went so far as to casually endorse the idea of sending National Guard troops into San Francisco, which is some fascist theatrical nonsense that Trump has been wielding as a threat to make liberal cities cow to his dictatorial whims. To Benioff, according to his comments, this would just be a welcome addition to SF’s understaffed police department, and Benioff seems to still have a circa-2021 view of what SF’s streets look like — which makes sense given that he lives full time on Hawaii’s Big Island.
But now the New York Times is reporting on a memo that Salesforce sent to the Trump administration in August, pitching the idea that it was the company most suited to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement with its “talent acquisition” problems, in order “to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.”
This was apparently a five-page document, and seems to have been a response to a request for proposals by ICE to aid in its hiring needs — which have grown greatly since Trump’s ICE has gone hog-wild arresting brown people across the country, sometimes regardless of their citizenship status, and tossing them in detention centers.
The proposal reportedly suggested ways that Salesforce’s AI software could help ICE in its recruitment and hiring. And it talked about being able to “implement an aggressive, high-yield marketing strategy” in order to find more ICE recruits.
Neither Benioff nor any representative for Salesforce cared to comment on the memo, but the Times said that after speaking with people at the company, no one denied the document’s authenticity.
While controversy over Salesforce seeking work with ICE would be natural given the political tenor of 2025, Salesforce’s working relationship with ICE extends back over a decade. As the Times notes, Salesforce has had contracts with ICE going back to the Obama and Biden administrations, and its ties to the federal government are many. Benioff even described federal agencies, collectively, as Salesforce’s “largest and most important customer” in a September earnings call, representing billions in revenue for Salesforce.
So how, then, could Benioff be anything but supportive of the president? He didn’t necessarily have to run his mouth about the National Guard thing, but you get the capitalist point here.
The Times also pulls a phrase from “deep” in Salesforce’s most recent earnings report, which acknowledges the risks of depending on government contracts as administrations change, and says, “Our relationships with certain government entities may result in negative publicity or reputational harm.”
State Senator and potential Pelosi successor Scott Wiener — who, surely, knows the open secret of the depths of Salesforce’s ties to the feds — gave a comment Thursday about this latest memo revelation, saying, “It’s completely unacceptable for any San Francisco company to help ICE scale up so that it can deploy more secret police to terrorize people in American neighborhoods.”
And SF Supervisor Danny Sauter gave a comment to the Times as well, saying, “For someone to claim that they support San Francisco and then be embedded with ICE like this is deeply concerning.”
But no one ever said Benioff “supported” San Francisco more than he supports his own bottom line. And this is just another fine example of how the oligarchs among us can’t be trusted, and another reason Salesforce’s crisis PR team will be working overtime this weekend.
Update: Speaking of that PR team, Benioff has now further walked back his statement about the National Guard, in a Friday tweet calling this week’s Dreamforce “the largest and safest… in our history.”
“I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he writes. “I sincerely apologize for the concern it has caused. It’s my firm belief that our city makes the most progress when we all work together in a spirit of partnership.”
Previously: Longtime SF Mayor Whisperer Ron Conway Puts Fellow Billionaire Marc Benioff on Blast
Top image: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks during Salesforce’s Dreamforce on September 17, 2024 in San Francisco, California. Some 45,000 workers in the tech industry were expected to attend the annual Dreamforce event, which runs through September 19. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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