A Billionaire’s Betrayal: Salesforce CEO’s Call for National Guard Splits San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, Marc Benioff played the part of San Francisco’s benevolent billionaire. He spread his fortune around the city, championed taxes to help the homeless and preached to other tech leaders about their duty to give back. He was, for many, a liberal icon in a liberal town.
That was the old Marc Benioff.
In a political shift that has stunned the city he calls home, the Salesforce founder and chief executive now says he avidly supports former President Donald J. Trump and wants him to send National Guard troops to the streets of San Francisco.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Mr. Benioff told The New York Times this week from his private plane.
His comments, a stark departure from his past alliances with Democrats, have landed like a slap in the face to city leaders. They see his call for soldiers as an invitation for an illegal military occupation and a betrayal of the city’s values.
“You can’t support San Francisco and want to see us invaded,” said Assemblyman Matt Haney, a Democrat. “It’s one thing to wrongly support Trump’s misguided economic policies. It’s quite another to support a direct assault and occupation of our city”.
The controversy erupted just days before Mr. Benioff’s company was set to welcome 50,000 visitors to its annual Dreamforce conference in the heart of downtown. He lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty police officers to provide security for the event, arguing the city needs to “re-fund” its police force, even though the department was never formally defunded.
San Francisco’s violent crime rates are actually below those in many other American cities. But the city has struggled with a shortage of police officers and visible problems with open-air drug use, creating a perception of disorder that Mr. Benioff and others find unacceptable.
The backlash from city officials was swift and sharp.
“This is a slap in the face to San Francisco,” Matt Dorsey, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, wrote on social media.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she was “disappointed that anyone would want to invite that chaos into our city”. She vowed to prosecute anyone, including federal agents, who harasses residents or uses excessive force.
State Senator Scott Wiener called the idea of a military occupation both unneeded and unwanted. “Salesforce is a great San Francisco company that does so much good for our city,” he wrote. “Inviting Trump to send the National Guard here is not one of those good things. Quite the opposite”.
The office of Mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat, offered a more muted response, choosing to highlight falling crime rates and new police hiring efforts without directly addressing Mr. Benioff’s comments.
Mr. Benioff’s new political posture puts him in direct opposition to his close friend, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has sued the Trump administration over its deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles. It also aligns him with a growing number of tech executives who are now embracing Mr. Trump after years of tension.
During a 50-minute interview, Mr. Benioff did not utter a single negative word about the president or his policies.
“I fully support the president,” he said. “I think he’s doing a great job”.
He is close enough to Mr. Trump to have been seated across from him at a state dinner in England last month, where Mr. Benioff said he spent the evening telling the president “how grateful I am for everything he’s doing”.
This new alliance marks a dramatic turn for a man who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and once funded a campaign to tax businesses, including his own, to pay for homeless services. Mr. Benioff now says he was never a progressive, but was instead a longtime Republican before becoming an independent voter.
For the politicians and residents who long saw him as an ally, the reversal has been jarring.
“This threw me for a loop,” said Myrna Melgar, a San Francisco supervisor. She wondered if the shift was motivated by business interests, a familiar story from the railroad barons to the tech titans.
As the city debates the balance between public safety and civil liberties, Mr. Benioff’s words have revealed a deep fracture. The billionaire who once led chants for peace now champions a solution that many of his neighbors see as an act of war.
The question hanging over San Francisco is whether this is a temporary political calculation or the permanent redefinition of a city icon.
Author: Junaid Arif
Date: 11 Oct, 2025
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