Salesforce Leadership
Marc Benioff
Chair, CEO & Co-Founder
Marc Benioff is Chair, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Salesforce and a pioneer of cloud computing. Under Benioff's leadership, Salesforce has become the third-largest enterprise software company and the largest enterprise applications company in the world.
Benioff was named “Innovator of the Decade” by Forbes and is recognized as one of the World’s 25 Greatest Leaders by Fortune, one of the 10 Best-Performing CEOs by Harvard Business Review, as the CNN Business CEO of 2020 and Chief Executive Magazine's 2022 CEO of the Year. He was named a “Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur,” one of France's most prestigious awards for an individual, in recognition of Salesforce’s longstanding relationship with France and support to French Polynesia during the pandemic. Benioff received both the Yale Legend in Leadership Award and the Colin Powell Distinguished Leadership Award in 2024. He has been awarded a Society for Progress Medal for courageous leadership in integrating business performance and societal progress. In 2019, Benioff was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. For his leadership on equality, Benioff has been honored by GLAAD, the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative and Variety Magazine with its EmPOWerment Award. In 2020, he and his wife, Lynne, received a George H.W. Bush Points of Light Award for their civic engagement.
Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, and it is now a Fortune 150 company with 70,000+ employees, guided by five core values — trust, customer success, innovation, equality and sustainability. The company has been recognized as the Most Innovative Company by Forbes, a Best Place to Work by Fortune, and the 10th Most Admired Company in the World by Fortune.
Building a different kind of company, Benioff created Salesforce to not only develop great products, but also to have a positive impact on the world. On day 1, Benioff created the 1-1-1 model of philanthropy, committing 1% of Salesforce’s equity, product and employee time to the community since the company’s founding 25 years ago. He also co-founded the Pledge 1% movement . Today, more than 20,000 companies have adopted the 1-1-1 model. He is the owner and co-chair of TIME.
Giving Back: Hawaii, Healthcare, Education and More
Benioff and his wife, Lynne, have focused their philanthropy on healthcare, the environment, public education and homelessness. The Benioffs have given more than $250 million to the University of California, San Francisco to build UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland. In 2024, in one of the largest private donations in Hawai’i’s history, the Benioffs announced $150 million in gifts to medical centers on the islands of Hawai’i and on O’ahu, The gifts will enable the two centers, renamed Hilo Benioff Medical Center and Straub Benioff Medical Center, respectively, to expand access, build out critical areas of care and support a continuum of care partnership with UCSF Health.
The Benioffs have also established the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California Santa Barbara, the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, the UCSF Benioff Initiative for Prostate Cancer Research, the UCSF Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine, and provided the initial funding for the Stanford Microbiome Therapies Initiative.
A member of the World Economic Forum ("WEF") Board of Trustees, Benioff co-founded 1t.org — the global movement to conserve, restore and grow one trillion trees — and the WEF Friends of Ocean Action. He also serves as the inaugural Chair of WEF's Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco.
Benioff is the owner and co-chair of TIME, and the founder of TIME Ventures — a leading investment firm with over 200 investments. Benioff is author of the New York Times bestseller Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change.
Before launching Salesforce, Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation, where he was the youngest vice president in company history. When he was 14 years old, he sold his first piece of software, “How to Juggle,” for $75. He founded his first company, Liberty Software, which created video games, at the age of 15.
Benioff received a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, where he is on its Board of Trustees. In 2014, USC awarded Benioff an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.