Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary persons: Welcome to another induction into the Starkman Approved fast-growing CEO Hall of Shame. This site was supposed to be about restaurants, bars, and cultural happenings, but it’s somehow morphed into a soapbox railing against America’s business leadership crisis. For fawning CEO coverage, there’s always CNBC, where executives are free to spew their supposed wisdom without much pushback.
How’s this for a Starkman Approved slogan? They slobber. I clobber.
The Hall of Shame is filling quickly. Among the inductees: GM’s Mary Barra, Ford’s Jim Farley, United’s Scott Kirby, Delta’s Ed Bastian, Starbucks’ Brian Niccol, former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, AT&T’s John Stankey, Verizon’s Hans Vestberg, Allstate’s Tom Wilson, MillerKnoll’s Andi Owen, and Pepsi’s Ramon Laguarta. A brick-and-mortar Hall would be impossible — the cost of building a temple big enough to house all those egos would bankrupt even Elon Musk, who can speak with great authority about inflated CEO egos.
From Ohana to Headcount
Today’s honoree is Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who years ago put a bull’s-eye on his back touting his Hawaiian-inspired “Ohana” culture. Employees, customers, partners, and communities were supposedly one big family. Salesforce campuses were decorated with tiki statues, surfboards, and banners declaring, “Welcome to the Ohana.”
Benioff proudly pitched Salesforce as the warm, values-driven alternative to cold Silicon Valley tech companies. He was the Kumbaya CEO.
As readers of this blog know, the Starkman Approved Theory holds that those who most loudly proclaim superior values usually turn out to be full of it. Benioff has proven this multiple times, but his latest boasts show just how shameless he’s become.
On a recent podcast, Benioff bragged that Salesforce has eliminated 4,000 human customer support jobs and replaced them with virtual AI agents. He previously boasted that Salesforce’s AI agents now handle up to 50% of customer interactions and that support and sales are the two roles most easily automated. He claimed this “rebalancing” has already cut support costs by 17% — all while maintaining service levels.
“I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads,” Benioff told podcaster Logan Bartlett.
I’d welcome hearing from Salesforce customers about their experiences with these AI “assistants,” especially now that we know a hacking group recently broke into more than 700 Salesforce customer platforms — not by hacking Salesforce itself, but by exploiting a third-party AI sales agent. That integration served as the door, allowing attackers to siphon sensitive credentials and pivot into connected systems. Benioff may hail this as progress, but it’s also opened a dangerous new front of vulnerability.
One wonders: when Salesforce’s own systems are compromised and its virtual assistants go dark, who — if anyone — will answer the phone?
Caving to Wall Street
Benioff, with an estimated net worth of $9 billion, has proven he cares more about surviving on Wall Street than honoring his employees — or, for that matter, his customers. In early 2023, activist funds Elliott Management, Starboard Value, Third Point, and ValueAct all trained their sights on Salesforce. Their charge was underperformance: bloated costs, sluggish margins, and a stock lagging its peers.
As documented by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, the activist funds that targeted Benioff had themselves dramatically underperformed the S&P 500, the Dow, and the Nasdaq over the past 3, 5, 7, and 10 years. In other words, the activists pointing fingers at Benioff were no Warren Buffetts.
Said Sonnenfeld and Tian in a Fortune op-ed: “Instead, the activists should learn something from Benioff on shareholder value creation and not vice versa.”
Yet rather than call out the hypocrisy or defend his Ohana, Benioff caved. Within weeks, Salesforce axed 8,000 workers — about 10% of its workforce — and shrank its office footprint.
To keep the activists at bay, Benioff in 2022 authorized the company’s first-ever stock buyback program for $10 billion. In 2023, under activist pressure, he doubled that to $20 billion. A year later, Salesforce expanded it again to $30 billion. And just this week, Salesforce disclosed it has raised the total authorization to a staggering $50 billion, with nearly $8 billion already spent this year.
The tens of billions Salesforce has poured into stock buybacks could have gone to product innovation, customer service, or — dare I say — keeping some “family” members on payroll. Instead, Benioff chose to funnel it to the one part of his Ohana that truly matters: shareholders.
The Stakeholder Chameleon
Years ago, Benioff was singing a much different tune, opining in CEO magazine and elsewhere that chief executives had a responsibility to more than just their shareholders — a once-popular Davos conceit known as stakeholder capitalism.
“Today, CEOs need to stand up not just for their shareholders, but their employees, their customers, their partners, the community, the environment, schools, everybody,” he said.
At the World Economic Forum in 2021, Benioff declared: “In the pandemic, it was CEOs…who were the heroes. They pivoted rapidly — not for profit, but to save the world.”
But as Peter Goodman noted in Davos Man, Benioff’s compassionate capitalism was more sleight of hand. In 2018, Salesforce and Benioff kicked in $7 million for a San Francisco tax initiative to curb homelessness, the same year Salesforce raked in $13 billion in revenues while paying no federal taxes. The company ran its money through 14 offshore subsidiaries, making its taxable income vanish. As Goodman put it, Benioff’s “stakeholder” vision somehow airbrushed the government out of the picture.
A CEO Ohana
Benioff is a CEO weather vane, shamelessly bloviating on whatever issue best serves his purposes. If stakeholder capitalism becomes fashionable again, expect him to wax on about CEOs saving the planet. But Benioff has unequivocally demonstrated that the only stakeholder that truly matters is himself.
Benioff richly deserves his induction into the Starkman Approved Hall of Shame — an Ohana of CEOs who blow with whatever cultural wind keeps them in power.