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Mr. Benioff, the Salesforce C.E.O. and owner of Time magazine, once supported Hillary Clinton and a business tax for homeless services. Now he’s fully behind Donald Trump.
Oct. 10, 2025Updated 6:57 p.m. ET
For years, San Franciscans considered him their benevolent, big-hearted billionaire.
While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.
But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0.
The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale.
Mr. Benioff’s shift serves as another example of a prominent Bay Area tech executive acceding to the Republican president’s view of the world. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, gave Mr. Trump a 24-karat gold gift and heaped praise upon the president in an August visit to the Oval Office. Last month, at a White House dinner for tech barons, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Mr. Trump he was “a very refreshing change.”
To many Silicon Valley observers, such attempts to accommodate Mr. Trump are simply a matter of protecting tech businesses, especially after watching Mr. Trump threaten companies, individuals and institutions that have run afoul of him. And Salesforce has hundreds of software contracts with the federal government.
Nearly nine months into Mr. Trump’s second term, San Francisco has avoided the heavy federal incursions seen in Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago. The most palpable action in the city has involved agents arresting immigrants at the federal courthouse, sometimes in aggressive ways.
But the president, in an Oval Office gathering in August, mentioned that he was considering sending federal troops into San Francisco as he ticked off a list of other Democratic-led cities. He said that Democrats had “destroyed” San Francisco and that he would “clean that one up, too.”
