Marc Benioff
He’s the CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Salesforce, one of the world’s largest software companies, which owns the popular messaging service Slack and is worth nearly $300 billion. He also owns Time magazine.
When I ask Benioff about the properties in the anonymous LLCs, things seem to take a turn. He starts speaking more quickly and fidgets with a piece of paper in his hand. He’s reluctant to go through the holdings, and his adviser on the Zoom call jumps in to say we can discuss later.
A couple of days before the interview, Benioff texted the same NPR colleague again, asking for intel on my story. Then he called me and demanded to know the title of this piece. During that call, he also mentioned he knew the exact area where I was staying. Unnerved, I asked how he knew, and he said, “It’s my job. You have a job and I have a job.” During the interview, he brings up more personal details about me and my family.
I leave the meeting disconcerted and still unclear about what exactly is happening with his land in Waimea.
The following day, I drive around with a photographer to take pictures of the town and Benioff’s projects. We go to the property he described as a community center and are confronted by one of his employees. The photographer explains we’re there to take photos of the outside of the building. Shortly afterward, I get a text from Benioff. His employee seemed to think we were “snooping,” and he says he’s escalating the incident to NPR CEO John Lansing. Lansing confirmed he spoke with Benioff, without going into detail — the NPR newsroom operates independently, and the CEO is not involved in editorial decision-making. Benioff didn’t respond to my question about the purpose of this call.
Pure lib-brain. If our society is dependent upon the philanthropy of billionaires, you are right, we ARE fucked. But he isn’t looking to “make the world better,” if that were the case he would be funding a socialist/communist party that would replace the Democrats in the United States, instead he is funding charter schools.
Jesus Chris, if you think a socialist/communist party is anything but terrible you need to look at history.
It’s a great idea but it’s fundamentally flawed and corrupt. Please read some books.
And no, don’t twist my words into saying that we are dependent on billionaires. But pretending they’re bad and are all evil/can’t be part of a solution shows very poor critical thinking skills.
You’re deeply misinformed my friend, and that misinformation has been and still is used for taking more of your (and everyone you know) labor than you receive, and shuttling the excess to the top. Socialism has long standing tradition in the West in the form of democratic parties that have driven social reforms. Social security, unemployment benefits, 40 hour work week, universal healthcare, labor organizing law - pretty much all safety nets and working conditions improvements made are socialist policies. This is what democratic socialist parties do in the West. They do it via direct policies and via strengthening labor organization laws. Think the reforms introduced by the New Deal in the US that shuttled money down from the top into the workers which created the average Joe life America was famous for up until the 70s-80s.
You are lost
There are absolutely ZERO accusations against socialism or communism that you can make which are not being committed by capitalism RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
ZERO.
This is why history repeats itself.
You have some of the worst nations in the world failing and mass murdering their citizens due to communism/socialism and you can’t see that.
Can you seriously say you’d want to live in a country like a Russia VS most other capitalist countries? Do you honestly not read or understand anything about how awful those systems are?
It’s shocking how entitled you and others are.
You know Russia is a capitalist country now right?
And it’s ruled by unaccountable billionaires who can murder without accountability
It is amazing how tunnel-visioned you are. Are.you seriously saying that you want to live in a corporate dystopia with no recourse for grievance? Do you even know what year it is?
Also, if socialism/communism are so bad and doomed to fail, why do capitalist countries spend such absurd amounts of money to stop other countries from having it instead of defending their own? Why not let them fail on their own? Why does the Cuban embargo exist if it doesnt mean that the US has been lied to about it’s “threat”? Why would the CIA EVER bother to overthrow central and south American countries if socialism was doomed to fail and capitalism was “a system based on free and fair exchange”?
You never learned one single fucking thing from history, you cuck.
I like how you can’t grasp the importance of the title of the article.
oof. My guy, I salute your tenacity. These folks here are the wrong crowd to ever give an inch on that stuff though.
Thanks. And yep, it’s quite an extremist group…!