Marc Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist.

In 1979, when he was 15, Benioff founded Liberty Software, creating and selling games such as Flapper and King Arthur's Heir for the Atari 8-bit.

Royalties from these games helped Benioff pay for college.

While at USC, Benioff had an internship as a programmer at Apple where he wrote assembly code for the Macintosh.

He joined Oracle Corporation in a customer-service role after graduating.

Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in a variety of sales, marketing, and product development roles.

At 23, he was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year.

Three years later, he became the youngest person in the company's history to earn the title of vice president.

Benioff grew up in Hillsborough and graduated from Burlingame High School in 1982.

Benioff received a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Southern California, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, in 1986.

Benioff is a second cousin of showrunner and television writer David Benioff, known for Game of Thrones.

He is married to Lynne Benioff and has two children.

The family lives in San Francisco, California.

While in high school, Benioff sold his first application, How to Juggle, for $75.

Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999 in a San Francisco apartment and defined its mission in a marketing statement as "The End of Software."

This was a slogan he used frequently to preach about software on the Web, and used as a guerilla marketing tactic against the dominant CD-ROM CRM competitor Siebel at the time.

Benioff extended Salesforce's offerings in the early 2000s with the idea of a platform that allowed developers to create applications.

Salesforce is now the biggest employer in San Francisco and the anchor tenant of Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco.

Benioff also serves on the World Economic Forum's board of trustees and USC board of trustees.

In 2003, President George W. Bush appointed Benioff co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

In 2004, he co-wrote Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well with Karen Southwick.

In 2006, he co-wrote The Business of Changing the World: 20 Great Leaders on Strategic Corporate Philanthropy with Carlye Adler.

In 2009, he co-wrote Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry, also with Carlye Adler.

In 2009, Benioff was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and is a member of its board of trustees.

In 2012, he was named one of the "Best CEOs in the World" by Barrons and received The Economists Innovation Award.

Benioff is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of Time magazine since 2018.

Benioff was raised in a Jewish family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He is the grandson of Marvin Lewis, a California trial attorney and once-time member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who championed the creation of the BART system.

On September 16, 2018, Marc and his wife Lynne bought Time for $190 million.

In 2019, Benioff started Time Ventures, a venture capital fund that has invested in multiple companies, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Universal Hydrogen and NCX.

In 2021, two companies Time Venture backed, Planet Labs and IonQ, went public.

Benioff is a member of Business Roundtable, an advocacy group of CEOs, and the Business Council.

In November 2021, Benioff became co-CEO of Salesforce when Bret Taylor's promotion to co-CEO was announced.

One year later, Bret Taylor stepped down as Salesforce co-CEO, leaving Marc Benioff as the sole CEO again.

As of February 2022, Benioff had an estimated net worth of US$8.31 billion according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

A 2024 investigation by NPR journalist Dara Kerr found that Benioff has purchased more than 600 acres of land in Hawaii, mostly near the town of Waimea on Big Island.

Benioff's purchases, which totaled $24.5 million as of February 2024, have sparked concern among Waimea locals regarding rising housing prices.

Benioff has co-written four books about business and technology.

In 2019, he again co-wrote Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change, with Monica Langley.

The book became a New York Times bestseller.