Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff has been grilled by his own staff for making “vile” jokes about ICE during a keynote address.
Benioff, 61, tastelessly said that ICE agents were standing in the back of a Las Vegas convention hall after inviting Salesforce’s international employees who traveled to the meeting to stand up, implying they would be deported.
Reports say Benioff, who also owns Time magazine, later taunted that ICE agents were around for employees who had not yet used Slackbot and then whined that he did not understand Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.
An attendee told Gazetteer SF that the executive’s initial joke on Tuesday drew “faint boos” from the room of over a thousand employees. Those staffers have since gone even further with a scorched-earth approach in the company’s Slack channel.
Business Insider reports that staff reacted on Slack by writing “NOT FUNNY” and that they found the remarks from Benoiff, whom they have previously slammed as being tone-deaf, “deeply horrifying.”
“All he had to do was do a corporate presentation. One job,” wrote a staffer in a Salesforce Slack channel, according to BI. “Just tell us about agents or something and don’t make a plutocratic billionaire joke showing how distant you are from real life.”
Another wrote, “How can you talk about trust and equality right after making jokes about ICE?”
Benioff, who Forbes estimates is worth $7.5 billion, is a one-time Hillary Clinton donor who now aligns with MAGA. He went so far as to ask President Donald Trump to send National Guard troops into his hometown of San Fransico last fall.
Criticism of his latest ICE joke, which came on the heels of federal immigration agents fatally shooting two American citizens in Minnesota, was not limited to the rank and file.
Slack general manager Rob Seaman, once the chief digital officer at Salesforce, told his staff in an internal message that the remark was indefensible. Slack was acquired by Salesforce in 2021.
“I want to acknowledge the jokes that happened this morning at CKO,” Seaman wrote in a Slack channel, according to BI. “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.”
Craig Broscow, a Salesforce vice president, called on Benioff to address staff concerns about the joke, saying it is “overshadowing” his employees’ work.
Some staff noted that Benioff’s jokes clash with a statement he made to employees after Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal agents.
“As we witness the horrible violence this weekend in Minnesota, I want to check in with everyone,” Benioff wrote in an internal message last month, according to BI.
An employee said of the statement now, “So this was just lip service after all?”
Wired reports that staff is now circulating a letter to Benioff that calls on him to denounce recent ICE killings and also prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents.
Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment about the backlash. Benioff has not addressed the controversy, but BI notes that a transcript of its CEO’s speech shared on its internal website does not include the ICE jokes.
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