A 6,400-word article in Wired about the founder and CEO of Salesforce (who rescued Time from the silken coffin of the Meredith Corp.) sounds promising at first, and its headline — “The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff” — suggests insights into what makes the man tick.
Now, having read all of it twice through, I’m saddened by the thinness of Benioff’s presentation and execution. Benioff, like many others in woke capitalism, already has shown his willingness to use the threatened absence of his company as a way of punishing states that pass laws he considers flawed.
Wired’s report, by contributor Chris Colin, also shows Benioff’s willingness to use philanthropy as a way of shaming his fellow Bay Area executives who express contrary but mainstream opinions.
Colin writes about Benioff’s involvement in San Francisco’s Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax Ordinance (Proposition C):
Declaring that “our city is in a crisis,” he threw his full support behind the measure that promised to take his company’s money. He publicly outflanked the city’s ostensibly liberal mayor, London Breed—who opposed it on grounds that the measure didn’t allow for enough accountability—and pledged upward of $2 million to the Prop. C campaign. But it was on Twitter that Benioff truly went to town. “As SF’s largest employer we recognize we are part of the solution,” he declared on October 9.
Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, surely still smarts from what followed.
“I want to help fix the homeless problem in SF and California. I don’t believe this (Prop C) is the best way to do it,” Dorsey replied. “Mayor Breed was elected to fix this. I trust her.”
Maybe Dorsey hadn’t spent much time on Twitter. In 279 characters Benioff calmly eviscerated him.
“Hi Jack. Thanks for the feedback. Which homeless programs in our city are you supporting? Can you tell me what Twitter and Square & you are in for & at what financial levels? How much have you given to heading home our $37M initiative to get every homeless child off the streets?”
Colin brings a bracing pessimism about how much Salesforce walks Benioff’s talk in its business dealings:
But it’s worth noting a few asterisks in his call to arms. For one, Prop. C taxes certain sectors differently than others, making it more burdensome to, say, a fintech company like Square, which would have to pay twice as much tax as Salesforce, despite bringing in a fraction of its revenue. But more important is the part Benioff never mentions: the zero dollars his company paid in federal income tax that year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
“This is a company that had $7.8 billion in gross profit in 2018 and didn’t pay a dime in federal income tax,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told me, before running through the assorted mechanisms used by the country’s corporations to avoid contributions to the federal treasury: patents held by foreign subsidiaries. The so-called stock options loophole, which allows companies to lower their taxable income by paying executives in stock options. Offshore accounts. (As of 2017, Salesforce had 14 tax haven subsidiaries, in Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Singapore, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Ireland, according to a report from the advocacy group US PIRG and ITEP.)
There is precious little role for faith, religion or spirituality in this report. This is as deep as it goes, in a passage about a sabbatical that Benioff took from an earlier job at Oracle:
For five months he swam with dolphins in Hawaii and traveled throughout India, where he had “an incredible awakening.” He met with the humanitarian leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, as well as the Dalai Lama, who “talked about finding one’s calling and the importance of community service.” But most profound, he says, were the words of the Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi, known as the hugging saint or Amma.
“It was she who introduced me to the idea, and possibility, of giving back to the world while pursuing my career ambitions,” Benioff wrote. “I realized that I didn’t have to make a choice between doing business and doing good.” …
Over the years, he would proselytize Salesforce’s 1-1-1 model, in which the company donates 1 percent of its revenue, 1 percent of its product, and 1 percent of its employees’ time to the community. He would install meditation rooms on every floor of Salesforce Tower. He would be periodically subject to epiphanies of rectitude, like “I am not gonna have any more meetings that aren’t at least a third women.” And in the nation’s most influential publication, The New York Times, he would call on “my fellow business leaders and billionaires” to create a “more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone.”
That’s right, 1 percent.
That may be impressive in corporate culture, but it’s not even walking-around money in historic Judaism (Benioff’s cultural heritage) or Christianity (which has built on the Old Testament theme of giving 10%, although it is taught more faithfully than it is practiced).
There’s not much more to be found in Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change, which Benioff wrote with Monica Langley. Other than two paragraphs about the hugging guru and her anodyne challenge for his career path (“In your quest to succeed and make money, don’t forget to do something for others”), Benioff remembers this:
Joe Teplow, whose company Rebel we acquired last year, told me about what he called a “remarkable moment of religious harmony powered by Salesforce.” He was about to recite a Jewish prayer in one of the mindfulness rooms of our New York tower when Youssef Abbasi, a solutions engineer, walked in to perform his midday Muslim prayer. Joe moved over to make room, and they prayed beside each other in the languages of their religions. …
Having some levity goes a long way toward reducing tension and restoring focus. It helps in cultivating a beginner’s mind. As the Dalai Lama says, laughter is good for thinking because when people laugh, it’s easier for them to admit new ideas to their minds.”
If this is enough to make a gospel, even if only about wealth, the late Stephen Covey was the St. Thomas Aquinas of our time.