Time magazine owner and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was booed by his own employees after making a tasteless joke about ICE during an all-hands meeting.
The tech founder, who Forbes estimates is worth $7.5 billion, thanked international Salesforce staff for flying to the United States to attend this week’s meeting in Las Vegas. However, he then asked them to stand and oddly remarked that ICE agents were in the back of the room, presumably to deport them, multiple reports say.
Someone in attendance told Gazetteer SF that the executive’s joke drew “faint boos” from the room, which was packed with more than a thousand employees.
It did not stop the 61-year-old San Francisco native—who urged President Donald Trump to send the National Guard into his hometown last fall—from making additional unfunny, MAGA-coded remarks.
A Gazetteer tipster said that Benioff later “cracked another joke about ICE being present” and then groaned about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance, claiming he “wasn’t sure what it was about.”
Salesforce employees were rightfully disgusted by the speech.
“It’s hard to believe this company still has values when you make completely off-base jokes about ICE in your opening keynote,” said one employee in an internal Slack viewed by the Gazetteer. “That’s unacceptable.”
The local tech site noted that the message received “almost 800 emoji reactions in support.”
Fed-up employees have since gone even more public with their displeasure.
Wired reports that staff are now circulating a letter to Benoiff that calls on him to denounce recent actions by ICE, like the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and also prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents.
Condemnation has come from outside Salesforce, too. Slack general manager Rob Seaman, who was once the chief digital officer at Salesforce, reportedly told his staff in an internal message—on Slack, of course—that the remark was indefensible.
“I want to acknowledge the jokes that happened this morning at CKO,” Seaman wrote, according to Business Insider. “I cannot defend or explain them. They do not align with my personal values, and I know this to be the case for many of you as well.”
Benoiff has not addressed the budding controversy. A representative for the billionaire did not respond to a request for comment.
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