{"id":61347,"date":"2026-10-29T10:23:06","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T07:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesauditimes.net\/en\/?p=61347"},"modified":"2026-10-29T10:23:06","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T07:23:06","slug":"marc-benioff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesauditimes.net\/en\/marc-benioff\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Benioff, Salesforce Chair and Chief Executive Who Took CRM Software to the Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Benioff is the chair, chief executive officer and co-founder of Salesforce<\/a>, the San Francisco company best known for customer relationship management software delivered over the internet. He has been chief executive since 2001, two years after the company was incorporated.<\/p>\n

He now leads one of the largest software businesses in the world through a shift to artificial intelligence. Salesforce reported $41.5 billion in revenue for its 2026 fiscal year, and its Agentforce platform for AI agents reached $800 million in annual recurring revenue.<\/p>\n

Education<\/h3>\n

Benioff earned a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Southern California. He now serves on the university’s Board of Trustees, and USC awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2014.<\/p>\n

Career<\/h3>\n

His first steps in business came early. According to his official biography, he sold his first piece of software, a program called How to Juggle, for $75, and later set up Liberty Software, a small company that made video games.<\/p>\n

He then spent 13 years at Oracle, the database company co-founded by Larry Ellison<\/a>. Salesforce says he became the youngest vice president in Oracle’s history.<\/p>\n

On March 8, 1999, Benioff incorporated Salesforce with Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. The four began building the first version of their sales software in a rented one-bedroom flat on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

The product launched on February 7, 2000, at an event in San Francisco built around the slogan “The End of Software”. The slogan set out the company’s plan to deliver software over the internet.<\/p>\n

Benioff became chief executive and chairman in November 2001. In 2003 the company held its first Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Salesforce listed on the New York Stock Exchange on June 23, 2004, raising about $110 million at $11 a share. A year later, in September 2005, it launched AppExchange, a marketplace for software built by other companies to run on its platform.<\/p>\n

From the founding, Benioff set aside 1 percent of the company’s equity, product and employee time for community work, a plan known as the 1-1-1 model. He later co-founded the Pledge 1% movement, which Salesforce says more than 20,000 companies have joined.<\/p>\n

Acquisitions widened the business over the following decade. Salesforce bought ExactTarget in 2013, MuleSoft in 2018 and Tableau in 2019. It agreed to buy Slack in December 2020 and completed the deal in July 2021.<\/p>\n

Benioff shared the chief executive title with Bret Taylor from November 2021. Taylor left the company at the end of January 2023, and Benioff has led it alone since then.<\/p>\n

AI has been a long-running theme. Salesforce launched Einstein in 2016, unveiled the Einstein 1 Platform in 2023 and introduced Agentforce in 2024. In fiscal 2026 it completed the purchase of the data management company Informatica for a total net consideration of $9.6 billion.<\/p>\n

Current Roles<\/h3>\n