Editorial: Benioff riff a buzzkill

Add Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to the list of tech billionaires who have turned to unabashedly support President Donald Trump. This time, however, the stakes are incredibly high, as Benioff told the New York Times and San Francisco Standard that he’s “all for” Trump sending the National Guard to San Francisco. Of course, Benioff, who also owns Time magazine, made the comments in phone calls to reporters from his private jet, enroute to the city for his big Dreamforce confab taking place this week.

Benioff’s caving to Trump follows gay Apple CEO Tim Cook giving the president a 24-karat gold gift; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now allowing his platforms like Instagram and Facebook to traffic in anti-LGBTQ tropes, hate speech, and deplatforming; and, perhaps the most infamous of all, Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy in the early months of the second Trump administration as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. As the Times story also noted, gay OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has now turned into a Trump cheerleader. At a White House dinner for tech barons, the paper reported, Altman, who co-led San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s transition team, said that Trump was “a very refreshing change.”

These gay billionaires, Cook and Altman, have no idea what it’s like for the rest of the LGBTQ community, otherwise, they wouldn’t be groveling for Trump’s affections. Then again, it likely has to do more with their companies’ bottom lines and making sure tariffs and other regulations don’t put a crimp in their earning power, or, in the case of Salesforce and X, end their government contracts.

For many years, Benioff has been a generous benefactor to San Francisco nonprofits of all stripes. He, apart from many others, really seemed to care – to the tune of more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes over the last 26 years, as the Times noted. Now, we know it was all a mirage. He’s bummed because he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty cops to help patrol the Dreamforce confab. “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said of the National Guard.

What a buzzkill for Lurie, a multimillionaire and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Since becoming mayor in January, Lurie has worked to end the open-air drug markets, ramped up police presence in areas of the city, and reorganized the city’s street teams who work with unhoused people. The city has a shortage of sworn police officers, as Lurie and other city leaders know all too well. Benioff likely knows this too, or would, if he actually lived in the city. He acknowledged to the Standard that he hasn’t called San Francisco home for many years and has largely decamped to Hawaii.

The reaction from city leaders over Benioff’s comments was swift. “This is a slap in the face to San Francisco. It’s insulting to our cops, and it’s honestly galling to those of us who’ve been fighting hard over the last few years to fully staff our @SFPD,” gay District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey wrote on X. Gay Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman was more diplomatic, telling NBC Bay Area, "I am choosing to treat his remarks as an expression of frustration that a lot of San Franciscans share. I think his conclusion is completely wrong."

Dorsey subsequently posted a thank you to Benioff, who, after apparently realizing his tone-deaf interviews, attempted to backtrack and wrote on X that Salesforce was investing $15 billion in San Francisco over the next five years. Dorsey’s District 6 seat on the board includes South of Market where Salesforce has its headquarters and annual conference.

The danger in Benioff’s initial comments is that he’s playing right into Trump’s hands. The president has already – more than once – suggested National Guard troops will be deployed to San Francisco. And, given what’s transpired in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., this is not something that will be good for the city. (Judges have delayed guard deployments to Chicago and Portland.) These troops have run roughshod over citizens and immigrants in their supposed mission of supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are just vile in the way they treat people. We shudder at the thought of troops in the Tenderloin and Castro neighborhoods, which many LGBTQ people call home; the Mission district, where many Latinos reside; or anywhere else in the city.

As for Lurie, he has studiously avoided antagonizing Trump since taking office. A joint event featuring the two planned for Monday was abruptly canceled after Benioff’s comments. On Tuesday, he released a statement on the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s report showing a decline in accidental overdose rates for September. The mayor also said the city’s on track for a 70-year low in homicides.

“From the day I took office, I told San Franciscans my number one priority was keeping our streets safe and clean,” Lurie stated. “I was hearing from residents across the city for years that they were concerned about crime and felt that the city was caught flat-footed by the fentanyl crisis. As soon as I became mayor, we took a new approach.

“We created the SFPD Hospitality Zone Task Force to keep our commercial districts safe and launched our Rebuilding the Ranks plan to get our police department back to full staffing. We passed a Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance and launched our Breaking the Cycle plan to fundamentally transform our response to the behavioral health crisis and get people off the street,” the mayor added.

Lurie also noted that crime is down 30%, and the city is adding police officers and sheriff’s deputies for the first time in a decade. There are a record low number of encampments on city streets, he added, and overdose deaths are down 39% from January.

“I know our work is far from done – I see it every day when I walk the streets and talk to residents,” Lurie stated. “But our local law enforcement, outreach workers, community ambassadors, and I will continue to be relentless so we can deliver the safe and clean streets that every San Franciscan deserves.”

Benioff’s riff with reporters was not helpful: not to his friend, Lurie, not to San Francisco’s police officers and other first responders, and not to the residents who call the city home. It’s just another example of someone who is very wealthy spouting off without considering the possible ramifications.