Beth Kowitt, Columnist

Marc Benioff Has Torched His Do-Good CEO Image

October 21, 2025 at 2:47 PM UTC

Beth Kowitt is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America. She was previously a senior writer and editor at Fortune Magazine.

Role reversal.
Photographer: Michael Short/Bloomberg

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Marc Benioff, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Salesforce Inc., has spent north of $1 billion and decades trying to convince the public that he is the good kind of tech titan and that his enterprise software firm is the good kind of tech company.

So Benioff’s media blowup last week wasn’t just a little PR oopsie. It was a full-on torching of the carefully constructed narrative he’s spent so many years creating.