Marc Benioff and the “Good Billionaire” Brand
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Marc Benioff. Photo: lev radin/shutterstock
In late February, NPR’s Dara Kerr reported that Salesforce cofounder Marc Benioff had been quietly purchasing land on the Big Island of Hawaii, raising concerns among residents that they’ll be priced out of their homes.
Kerr spoke with Benioff and a local official who praised the billionaire and his wife Lynne for supporting causes across the state, including via their donation of 282 acres of land to the Hawaii Island Community Development Corp, which builds affordable housing. Nonetheless, Kerr painted Benioff, whose net worth hovers around $11 billion, as somewhat defensive, steering the discussion toward his philanthropy whenever pressed about his land acquisitions.
A week after the story aired, the Benioffs announced gifts totaling $150 million to hospitals in Hawaii, with the aim of increasing access to healthcare. Those commitments were over a year in the making, but that didn’t stop some outlets from implying that the windfall was an example of real-time philanthropic reputation burnishing to offset the unflattering NPR piece.
Whether or not this latest controversy around tech billionaire land acquisition in Hawaii has put Benioff into a defensive posture and reaching for philanthropy to shore up his image, he is something of a special case. He’s one of a handful of tech donors who shouldn’t have to shout his philanthropic bona fides from the rooftops.
Benioff is notable for the good press he’s received over the years. “When his plutocrat peers seem increasingly hell-bent on mucking everything up,” wrote Wired’s Chris Colin in 2019, “Benioff has carved out a different brand altogether: the good billionaire.” Meanwhile, Worth magazine dubbed him the seemingly oxymoronic “people’s billionaire,” while Forbes opted for the more alliterative “San Francisco’s Giant of Generosity.”
Why do people (mostly) place Benioff on a pedestal instead of reaching for a pitchfork? His philanthropy, naturally, is part of the answer. The Giving Pledge signatory pioneered the “pay-as-you-go” approach to philanthropy and the 1:1:1 model, in which a company gives 1% of its equity, 1% of its product and 1% of employees’ time back to the community. And he’s backed up his rhetoric by disbursing a good chunk of his net worth toward causes like homelessness prevention, ocean protection, prostate cancer and children’s health.
But Benioff has also gone beyond that to voice concerns about the prevailing economic order that has treated him so well. He has criticized unfettered capitalism and rampant inequality, asked to be taxed more and accused his peers in Silicon Valley of hoarding wealth. Or, to put it another way, if you asked the typical American to draw up the characteristics of a “good billionaire” — assuming one agrees such a person can even exist — Benioff would check off many, if not most, of those boxes. But is that enough to secure him the title?
Does calling out other billionaires a good billionaire make?
What’s striking about Benioff’s profile as a billionaire donor isn’t his giving priorities, which are relatively orthodox, or the amount of money he moves out the door. It’s his penchant for taking a piece of conventional philanthropic wisdom, publicly dialing up a sense of moral urgency and naming names.
Take the idea that the mega-rich should give more — not exactly a novel concept, but one that always bears repeating given billionaires’ continuing philanthropic stinginess. Benioff’s been sounding that call for a while now: In a 2012 op-ed in Forbes, he argued that his fellow Giving Pledge signatories have a moral responsibility to empty most of the safe before they shuffle off this mortal coil, even going so far as to take a subtle dig at one of the pledge’s cofounders. “[Warren] Buffett told me that while his wife encouraged him to be more philanthropic as his life went on, he believed his impact would be larger with the total sum at the end of his life,” Benioff wrote. “Maybe in money, but maybe not in meaning.”
Two years later, Benioff called out Mark Zuckerberg for a donation of $1 billion worth of stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, noting that the foundation was not obligated to move the money out the door. “Where’s it gone?” he asked. “What good is it doing now? I’m sure his intentions are positive, but we need to see that money get distributed.”
Talking to The Guardian in 2018, Benioff called out his entire region. “We have 70 billionaires in San Francisco,” he said. “Not all of them are giving money away. A lot of them are just hoarding it. They’re keeping it. That’s just who they are and how they look at their money.” Benioff went on to say that then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “just doesn’t want to give, that’s all. And he hasn’t given anything of consequence in the city.” (Dorsey ramped up his public giving in a substantial way in 2020 and the years following.)
It’s fairly common for business titans’ professional or even personal squabbles to spill into public view. But we rarely see a billionaire violating the gentleman’s agreement not to criticize other billionaires’ philanthropy.
We can call Benioff’s remonstrations a lot of things — justified, performative, misinformed, all of the above. Nonetheless, they raise an interesting question: Is this the kind of behavior we’d like to see from “good” billionaires? To the extent the average American thinks about these things, I suspect the answer is: Why not? If Benioff can browbeat his fellow billionaires to give more, then that’s a net gain for society.
How well does Benioff’s own giving measure up?
Of course, Benioff’s evangelism invites heightened scrutiny of his own philanthropy. Calling on fellow tech winners to give more is all well and good, but has Benioff been walking the walk himself?
Toward the end of each year, Forbes assigns a “Philanthropy Score” to the 400 richest Americans. The most charitable receive a five, meaning they’ve given away over 20% of their wealth, while those who notched a four have donated 10% to 19.99%. Critically, Forbes calculates the score based on donors’ out-the-door giving, rather than how much they have sitting in private foundations or donor-advised funds. Of the 69 tech billionaires on the list in 2023, only five received a score of five (Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll). Six had a score of four, including Benioff. In other words, by Forbes’ reckoning, he has given more than most, but still has plenty of room for improvement.
Philanthropic money out the door is a big deal, but other factors also inform how one might evaluate a billionaire’s “goodness,” such as how the donor amassed their fortune, or if their philanthropy brazenly advances their professional interests. No one, to my knowledge, has forcefully characterized Benioff as such a philanthropic opportunist, but the fact remains that the demands of his day job inevitably impinge on his methodically crafted, civic-minded persona.
Unlike the Gateses, Scott, Omidyar and Skoll, Benioff is currently CEO of a public company aiming to maximize shareholder value, which means he’s making decisions that optically clash with his calls for billionaire self-sacrifice. For example, Wired’s Colin reported that in 2017, Salesforce ramped up its lobbying efforts when Congress was considering then-President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which reduced corporate rates from 35% to 21%. “Like other big companies,” Colin wrote, “Salesforce wanted to make sure it wasn't going to pay more after tax reform.” (Benioff also demurred when Colin asked if he supported Elizabeth Warren’s call for a tax of 3% for wealth over $1 billion.)
Finally, we need to consider the complexion of Benioff’s giving. In his favor is the fact that unlike some of his peers, Benioff isn’t shunting money into DAFs, taking the write-off, calling it philanthropy and taking a victory lap. Nor can he and Lynne be faulted for their many mega gifts — like $100 million for what is now the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Children’s Hospital, $60 million to establish the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and $35 million for prostate cancer research initiative at UCSF.
But for a billionaire who’s been critical of the U.S. tax code and systemic inequities, Benioff has still mostly adopted a conventional “eds and meds” posture in his giving, channeling money to large public research institutions while not giving much to tackle the core issues of political economy and electoral power that, as IP’s founding editor David Callahan has argued, actually make the most difference when it comes to combating inequality and giving low-income Americans a leg up. Benioff is not alone in this regard. With a few exceptions, tech billionaires are reluctant to use their philanthropy to advocate for policies that could impact the economic and political systems that let them generate their mind-boggling wealth in the first place.
If that’s what it would take for a billionaire to be “good,” then Marc Benioff — not to mention nearly all his peers — doesn’t quite measure up. Then again, expecting billionaires to address deeply entrenched economic and political power imbalances is probably too big of an ask given the realities of extreme wealth and corporate power in the 21st century. In the absence of perfect, good — or even “good enough” — will probably suffice.
