Marc Benioff

Notable work and positions

Salesforce — Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer (1999– )
Time magazine — Co-owner, with Lynne Benioff (2018– )
Time Ventures — Founder (2019)

Biography

Marc Russell Benioff, born September 25, 1964, in San Francisco, co-founded the software company Salesforce in 1999 and serves as its chairman and CEO. He received a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Southern California in 1986 and spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation before founding Salesforce. He also founded the Salesforce Foundation, built around the “1-1-1” model committing one percent of the company's equity, product, and employee time to charitable causes, and in 2014 co-founded Pledge 1% with Scott Farquhar to extend that model to other companies. On September 16, 2018, Benioff and his wife, Lynne Benioff, purchased Time magazine for $190 million from Meredith Corporation, buying it as individuals with no connection to Salesforce. In 2019, he launched Time Ventures, a venture capital fund that has invested in companies including Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Planet Labs. He has co-written four books on business and technology, beginning with Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well (2004, with Karen Southwick). From 2010 to 2019, the Benioffs donated a total of $275 million to UCSF Children's Hospital. He has served on the USC Board of Trustees since 2010. Benioff was named CNN Business CEO of 2020 and Chief Executive's CEO of the Year in 2022, and was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 2022.