Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Russell Benioff is 61 years old, which is too young to be bleating endlessly about San Francisco defunding its police and being overrun by crime. Vast wealth does not confer subject-matter expertise. It doesn’t make you a theologian or a doctor or a political scientist.
The objective truth is that San Francisco never defunded its police, as more than one mayor — the person responsible for San Francisco’s budget and San Francisco’s police —has made clear to Benioff and everyone else. The police budget is at an all-time high.
This barstool talk would be embarrassing enough at a family gathering, let alone within earshot of the New York Times just days before his own company’s sprawling Dreamforce conference, which commenced today.
It is Benioff’s prerogative to praise President Trump, as he did in the Times. Oligarchs slipping on the armband to appease and flatter a narcissistic kleptocrat is hardly anything new. But it’s a different thing for Benioff to call for Trump to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco. And wouldn’t you know it, he did that too.
Vast wealth, again, does not confer subject-matter expertise. And it does not counter objective facts. Benioff subsequently attempted to walk back his call for National Guard intervention hard enough as to resemble John Cleese and the Ministry of Silly Walks by claiming he merely wants to see proper police staffing. So it’s worth noting that armed National Guardsmen do not — and cannot — assume the tasks of local law-enforcement.
As unnerving and disheartening as San Francisco’s overt misery and drug-use and mental instability can be, that’s not the same thing as crime. Reported San Francisco crime, which was already low, is down nearly a third. Homicides are on track for their lowest yearly total since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House and the Giants were playing in Manhattan. Subjectively, you may not feel safe in San Francisco. Objectively, you’ve rarely been safer.
Alas, most of us will not be billionaires. But, in the worst of all arrangements, the billionaires’ ability to disregard and bury inconvenient facts is now a feature of modern life for all of us, regardless of income level. Facts, today, matter less and less.
Marc Benioff said cavalier and crassly stupid things to the newspaper of record and then ungracefully attempted to walk it back — starting with an in-house message to the 84,000 captive readers of the “All Salesforce” Slack channel in which he published the anodyne statement he later tweeted.
But this is San Francisco, and vaingloriousness loves company. To wit:
- “I can’t be silent any longer,” tweeted DA Brooke Jenkins on Oct. 10 shortly after Benioff’s quotes ran in the Times. “Let me be clear,” she addressed a hypothetical federal officer, “If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents, use excessive force or cross any other boundaries that the law proscribes, I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”
At last a burning question was answered: What will it take for Jenkins to prosecute a police officer for on-the-job misconduct? Apparently, you have to be from somewhere else.
- Supervisor Matt Dorsey tweeted that Benioff’s words were “a slap in the face” to the city. True, but, more so, to the cops and to Matt Dorsey, who only got $50,000 from Benioff for Dorsey and Aaron Peskin’s doomed Rube Goldberg ballot initiative to retain officers by paying them pensions and salaries simultaneously.
Making this into a reductive argument about police staffing glosses over the epochal detail that federal troops cannot act as local law-enforcement and Trump’s troop deployments have repeatedly been ruled illegal by his own judicial appointees.
San Francisco has hundreds fewer cops than the charter-mandated tally. But even when the department was fully staffed, the Tenderloin and SoMa were beset with poverty, misery and drug-use. As noted above, crime rates and homicide levels are better now. You’re not going to believe this, but San Francisco’s problems are more difficult to solve than sending in the cavalry.
- In the wake of Benioff’s invitation to send in the guard, the public pressure group Blueprint, the reanimated remains of imploded public pressure group TogetherSF, plugged a (since canceled) rally against federal intervention to be helmed by Jenkins. But this is curious: These wealthy groups last year went all-in on mayoral candidate Mark Farrell, who favored calling in armed National Guardsmen to quell the city’s drug problems. This would be a strange and terrible development even with a president who respected the rule of law.
Incidentally, when Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 tapped the California Highway Patrol and National Guard to tackle San Francisco’s drug problem, it didn’t involve armed troops in camouflage patrolling the Tenderloin. Instead it was all behind-the-scenes investigative and administrative work — stuff like tying neighborhood dealers to a cartel running out of the Central Valley.
Federal aid of this sort would be welcomed again in San Francisco, and would probably be offered by authorities who actually cared to address the city’s actual problems — instead of reveling in the power play of sending troops to occupy Baghdad by the Bay.
- Even Neighbors for a Better San Francisco announced it will erect billboards in Mar-a-Lago and D.C. reading “Dear Mr Trump: No thanks, we’re good. xo San Francisco.”
That seems awfully provocative, which is the exact opposite of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s tack to never mention the feds or even name the president.
Lurie has also made it clear he has no desire to work with the big-money group or its director, Jay Cheng. If Neighbors were to goad the president into harassing San Francisco, thereby giving itself political relevance and causing trouble for a mayor who has frozen it out — well, that would be unfortunate for the rest of us.
Again, most of us will not be billionaires. But what’s the point of being one if you’re still a groveling sycophant? Or, as it was more artfully put in the King James version: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
On the other hand, what good is a soul? It can’t get you power or influence or a chance to talk up MissionForce with the commander in chief.
A dozen or so years ago, when Democrats were in the White House, Benioff was running through the dress rehearsal of his keynote speech for Dreamforce at the Masonic Auditorium. Salesforce workers are encouraged to attend these rehearsals and, in front of this vast room of his employees, Benioff purportedly flubbed one of his lines, unintentionally understating a dollar figure. Hey, no problem: That’s what rehearsal is for. It’s what came next that’s notable.
Benioff laughed off the miscue with an off-the-cuff joke, allegedly stating something along the lines of how lying about numbers made him sound like a Republican. Everyone laughed.
It’s worth noting that the capacity of the Masonic Auditorium is just shy of 3,500. And Benioff purportedly felt comfortable saying something like this in front of a very big room.
Years later, in 2018, Benioff and Salesforce were the major donors behind Prop. C, which taxed businesses up to 0.5 percent after their first $50 million gross to fund housing and homeless services.
Benioff at the time roasted his fellow rich CEOs who opposed Prop. C. Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter and Square, turned out to be a perfect foil: The public was none too sympathetic to the plight of a CEO made to pay a fraction of a percent to the least fortunate on revenue over $50 million on his second Fortune 500 company.
But, in retrospect, it does warrant mentioning that, the way Prop. C is structured, Salesforce is taxed a lower amount than other businesses — businesses that gross far less than Salesforce. It also warrants mentioning that Salesforce, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, paid no federal income tax between 2018 and 2020.
And perhaps this is why Benioff’s purported ease maligning Republicans a dozen years ago and his role pushing Prop. C may not ever have meant what people assumed at the time. A wealthy person donating to his preferred causes is very different than a government taxing its richest people and entities and using the proceeds to fund actual social programs.
Benioff has, gradually, if not suddenly, detached from San Francisco. This was reported in an excellent San Francisco Standard article last week and, last year, by NPR. In that story, Benioff was recounted as attempting to kill the article by inveighing upon NPR higher-ups. He also purportedly unnerved the author by telling her he knew her exact whereabouts as well as “personal details” about her and her family.
That’s disturbing. And a billionaire’s company paying no federal taxes is not “liberal” or even “woke” as Benioff was vapidly labeled in the days of yore. So perhaps it’s best to respect Benioff’s obvious generosity without making facile suppositions about what’s behind it all.
As is the case with the military troops Benioff would have marching through his hometown’s streets, we salute the rank, not the man.
