Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a longtime Democratic mega donor, is backing President Donald Trump on sending in the National Guard to San Francisco, after helping to heavily fund what dark money watchdogs call the protest-industrial complex.
In an interview with the New York Times last week, Benioff said Trump should deploy the National Guard to San Francisco, where Salesforce is headquartered, to clean up the city overrun with crime.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said of the federal troops, adding that he “fully supports the president” and thinks Trump is “doing a great job.”
Trump is turning to the National Guard as both a crime-fighting force and a riot response squadron for quelling the nationwide uprisings against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, namely in sanctuary cities. The anti-ICE unrest also reached San Francisco, which has its own sanctuary ordinance prohibiting local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration authorities.
Benioff’s comments came ahead of his annual Dreamforce conference in downtown San Francisco, a large-scale event requiring expansive security services. In the interview, Benioff bemoaned that he has to pay out of pocket for hundreds of off-duty police officers to patrol the area around the convention.
“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” Benioff said. “That’s how it used to be.”
Benioff’s call to restore law and order signifies a political about-face for the left-leaning billionaire and his philanthropic work.
Under Benioff, Salesforce handed over the keys to its global funding vehicle to a dark money network bankrolling disruptive protest politics across America.
In 2014, Benioff co-pioneered Pledge 1%, a corporate philanthropy model in which companies that take the pledge commit at least one percent of profits to charitable causes, preferably with “equitable” aims.
Pledge 1%, seeded by Benioff, acts as a corporate giving pipeline directing the flow of funds to such social justice initiatives. Since its inception, Pledge 1% has generated more than $3 billion from over 19,000 participating companies around the world, with the goal of “embedding social impact into the DNA of all businesses.”
Salesforce ultimately ceded control of Pledge 1%’s infrastructure to the Tides Foundation, one of the largest left-wing grantmaking operations in the U.S., responsible for funding agitation-style activism.
“It’s now managed by Tides and they work with [companies] one-on-one and tell you exactly what to do,” Salesforce’s chief philanthropy officer, Ebony Beckwith, told TechCrunch in a 2019 interview.
According to the Tides website, which describes its takeover of Pledge 1% as the venture’s fiscal sponsor and “thought partner,” Tides administers donor-advised funds, or charitable investment accounts, on behalf of these companies and offers financial guidance on “how/where to invest their philanthropic dollars.”
Tides, a pass-through funder of left-of-center organizations, has financed various activist activities connected to political upheaval, including giving grants to pro-Palestinian groups that stoked widespread chaos on major U.S. college campuses in 2023.
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“Salesforce’s funneling of funds through Tides is precisely how corporate philanthropy can feed the protest-industrial complex,” said Seamus Bruner, the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute.
From 2022 to 2024, the Salesforce Foundation, the company’s 501(c)(3) offshoot, directly gave various Tides entities a total of $27.4 million in grant money, according to tax filings, though those donations were earmarked for a wide range of vaguely described causes, such as “employment opportunities,” “general support,” “youth development,” and “solving homelessness.”
Following backlash from city officials over his commentary urging the National Guard’s deployment, Benioff announced that he is “doubling down on San Francisco” and that Salesforce is investing $15 billion over the next five years to “build a greater, safer city for everyone.” Through a private-public partnership with San Francisco, an additional $1 million will cover hiring bonuses for newly enlisted police officers, Benioff added.
However, he backtracked on welcoming federal intervention in San Francisco, saying that public safety is “first and foremost, the responsibility of our city and state leaders.”
“Whether Mr. Benioff intended it or not, his firm has helped bankroll the very networks now roiling cities,” Bruner told the Washington Examiner. “His recent call, which he has since softened, for President Trump to deploy the National Guard in San Francisco underscores how politically fraught this all has become.”
It is unclear why Benioff, who had donated hefty sums to the respective presidential runs of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, appears to have suddenly changed his heart on Trump and his administration’s agenda. Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment.
In September, Benioff sat across from Trump during a state dinner at Windsor Castle hosted by King Charles. As the Salesforce head was quoted as saying in the New York Times, Benioff repeatedly told Trump, “How grateful [Benioff is] for everything he’s doing.”
A number of Silicon Valley playmakers have lined up in a similar fashion to heap public praise upon the president, rubbing elbows with him at high-profile events. Apple CEO Tim Cook gifted Trump a 24-karat gold piece in an August trip to the Oval Office. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, told Trump he was “a very refreshing change” at a White House gala for tech tycoons.