Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump's proposals to send the National Guard to San Francisco, where the company is based and holds its annual conference. Benioff had already made an abrupt volte-face on his controversial position, which attracted widespread condemnation …
It is a bit like that isn’t it?
Offer unreserved support to the dictator dejour followed by a weaselly “I didn’t mean that. Honest guv’” as soon as he realised the possible impact on the share price
He’s hardly alone in this of course. It seems a good high percentage of US business is run by a bunch of shitty scummy amoral pond life.
That *is* the real Benioff. An amoral, self-serving corporate type who'll pander to whatever benefits him and his company most, and spin 180 degrees in a heartbeat if the audience and circumstances change.
Let's remember that Sam Bankman-Fried, who supposedly wanted to make money just to make the world a better place- then tried to use that to excuse his crimes- revealed he'd been donating equally to the US Republicans (i.e. hedging his political bets) and was reportedly planning a hard-pivot to right-wing anti-"woke" MAGA pandering in order to save his skin.
Never trust these types as far as you could throw them.
The very same Salesforce which decided that extorting a non-profit was a good idea and which only changed their tune when it created bad publicity for them.
Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week
If ever a Trumpism was appropriate: Benioff is a very bad person.
It's a bit like the Boolean probability problem of an assisted driving algorithm that phantom-brakes on a rural road at night because it suddenly interprets the moon on the horizon ahead as a yellow traffic light.
Do you stick with trying to teach the system to discriminate ever more finely between the plausible-seeming probabilities of "that yellow circle is the moon" (i.e. "Benioff's real position is pro-Trump") versus "that yellow circle is a traffic light" (i.e. "Benioff's real position is anti-Trump")?
Or, instead, do you try to teach it to recognize the extremely obvious underlying reality that moons don't suddenly transform themselves into traffic lights (i.e. that Benioff has no "real position" other than being an unprincipled hack who'll say whatever it's in his business interest to say)?
You never believe the walk back when someone tries to apologize AFTER they realize they've really stepped in doo-doo, or try to make excuses that they were misinterpreted or joking.
Clearly he was feeling the pressure from people wanting to cancel services with his company and is trying to walk it back. But its too late. People aren't going to believe the walk back, AND now the MAGA types are going to be pissed at him for cracking under pressure from the left. This is why if you're a founder/owner of a big company the last thing you should want is to stick your nose into politics in a big way. If you do you need to be prepared for the consequences, and not be surprised when you receive blowback. Because the LAST thing you want to do when you get blowback for stepping in a fraught political situation and expressing your true feelings is to try to walk it back. Congratulations, now both sides hate you, you moron!
> In addition, she said his apology suggests he might be "afraid he's going to lose his legacy."
...What fucking legacy? He thinks that 20 years after he dies, anyone will remember who he was? You run a large, mediocre SaaS company, dude. Not something that anyone outside of a small contingent of Silicon Valley and Wall Street dipshits cares about.
Exactly. Relatively few individuals get to be famous by being tech people, but if you wanted to be one of them, you have to do something consumer-facing and be really successful. You can be a Steve Jobs if you make a smartphone that lots of people have or a Clive Sinclair if you sell a lot of things with your name on them, and even he is probably a lot more famous here than he would be anywhere else. At a second level, you can be unrecognized but, when people ask who that is, they understand the result. People don't know who Evan Spiegel is, but if you say he's one of the founders and still runs Snapchat, they'll at least recognize that. This guy is in category three, where not only do they mostly not know who he is, they also mostly don't know what SalesForce makes. His legacy will not be political statements. If he wants a legacy, he's going to have to do something notably beneficial or evil with his money or mere force of will.
Salesforce is one of those corporate-facing B2B companies that, for all that they're huge and important, most people won't even have heard of.
And of those that have- many, I'd assume, because they have to use its software and services- I suspect that very few have any particularly positive affection towards it.
That matters because it's quite common even for companies of Salesforce's size to get taken over by equally large rivals. When that happens they often disappear surprisingly quickly- the various divisions get reorganised and absorbed into the acquiring company and any unwanted parts get spun/sold off. (*)
If the acquired company has a better reputation or name recognition, the acquirer *might* keep it on or even rebrand themselves after it. But usually it just disappears as it's replaced by the new name, along with any signs of the existence of the original company, forgotten to boring corporate history and a few ex-employees and customers who vaguely recall it with indifference.
If that happens to Salesforce, it will be quickly forgotten which- unlike (e.g.) a fragment of nostalgia-soaked 80s/90s pop culture- most people won't even remember, let alone care enough about to want to come back.
(*) Usually under one of those bland, made-up corporate names that betrays no hint of the company origins, and which are likely to soon get bought out by another company and disappear again anyway.
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Pretty much every tech CEO parrots the line of whomever is on power. Only when they face a backlash do they offer even the latest of apologies.
Note he failed to mention condemning deployment of the military to other Democrat held states.
With people in power, see what they don't do, not what they do do.
End of.
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