How Marc built the fortune
Marc Benioff's fortune rests on a business model he helped popularize: selling software as a subscription delivered through a web browser, instead of licensing programs that companies had to install on their own servers. In 1999 he left a senior job at Oracle and started Salesforce in a rented apartment in San Francisco with a small group of co-founders, including Parker Harris. The first product was a customer relationship management system that sales teams could use without buying hardware or hiring consultants.
Salesforce marketed itself aggressively as the alternative to traditional software, and corporate customers signed up quickly. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004 under the ticker CRM. Over the following two decades it broadened from sales tools into marketing, customer service, analytics, integration and collaboration software, often through acquisitions. Recurring subscription revenue gave the company predictable growth, and Benioff's founding stake became extremely valuable.
More recently Salesforce has positioned itself around artificial intelligence agents that handle customer service and sales tasks, which Benioff has made a central theme of the company's strategy.
Benioff's leadership has had periods of turbulence. Salesforce experimented with co-chief executives several times, and in 2023 activist investors pressed the company to cut costs and improve profit margins after a hiring surge during the pandemic. Benioff responded with layoffs, a large share buyback program and the disbanding of the board committee that oversaw acquisitions, steps that pleased shareholders and restored the stock's momentum. He has remained the dominant figure in the company throughout.
Companies and holdings
Benioff is chair and chief executive of Salesforce and one of its largest individual shareholders. Major acquisitions under his leadership include:
- ExactTarget, a marketing software company, in 2013
- MuleSoft, an integration platform, in 2018
- Tableau, the data visualization company, in 2019
- Slack, the workplace messaging service, completed in 2021
Outside Salesforce, Benioff and his wife Lynne bought Time magazine in 2018 and own it privately. He has also been an early investor in many startups through personal investments and a venture arm.
Salesforce Tower, which opened in 2018, became the tallest office building in San Francisco and a symbol of the company's presence in the city. The firm also hosts Dreamforce, one of the largest technology conferences in the world, which brings tens of thousands of customers and partners to San Francisco each year.
Early life and career
Benioff was born in 1964 in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area. As a teenager he wrote and sold simple video games for early home computers through his own small company. He studied business administration at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1986, and during college he worked as a summer intern at Apple.
After USC he joined Oracle, where he spent thirteen years in sales and marketing and became one of the company's youngest vice presidents at age 26. Larry Ellison was an early investor in Salesforce, although the two companies later became competitors. Benioff has said that a sabbatical spent travelling and reflecting shaped both the idea for Salesforce and his approach to corporate giving.
Philanthropy and public life
From the start, Benioff built philanthropy into Salesforce through what he called the 1-1-1 model, setting aside about one percent of equity, product and employee time for charitable purposes. Many other companies later adopted the same pledge. Personally, he and Lynne have given large sums to children's hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, now known as UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, and to homelessness programs, public schools and ocean conservation.
Benioff is an outspoken public figure who has argued that companies should serve stakeholders beyond shareholders. He has supported higher local taxes to fund homeless services in San Francisco and has used Salesforce's influence in debates over social policy in several states. He also spends significant time in Hawaii, where he has funded health care and community projects. He has also written several books about business and leadership, drawing on his experience building Salesforce and its philanthropic program.