Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce, speaks during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 18, 2024.
Halil Sagirkaya | Anadolu | Getty Images
As Salesforce welcomes tens of thousands of people to San Francisco for its annual Dreamforce conference, CEO Marc Benioff has found himself in the center of local controversy on a national issue.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Friday, Benioff appeared eager for President Donald Trump to send federal troops to his company’s hometown, inserting himself into a national debate about whether the president should call the National Guard into various Democrat-led cities that Trump has maligned.
The Trump administration recently deployed the National Guard to Portland and Chicago, sparking protests and lawsuits.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told the Times.
Benioff subsequently softened his comments, writing on X on Sunday that safety is “first and foremost, the responsibility of our city and state leaders.” But a heated online conversation was already well underway.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who moved to Texas from California, said federal intervention is needed to deal with crime in San Francisco. In posts on his social network X on Sunday, he said it would be “the only solution at this point,” and that “nothing else has or will work.” A day earlier, Musk, who has drawn criticism for his own drug use, characterized downtown San Francisco as a “drug zombie apocalypse.”
Musk still has big business in and around San Francisco. His artificial intelligence startup xAI, which owns X, has a sizable office in the city, and his brain computer interface company, Neuralink, recently leased a large property in South San Francisco. Tesla relocated to Texas, but the automaker’s engineering headquarters remains in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco.
Musk’s call for U.S. troops came in response to social media posts by Tom Wolf, who describes himself as a “a formerly homeless recovering addict in San Francisco,” and an “advocate for addiction recovery.”
“If you want to keep federal troops out of San Francisco, remove the organized drug dealers and 80% of the problem goes away,” Wolf wrote. “If you don’t, you reap what you sow.”
Musk shared Wolf’s post to his more than 227 million listed followers on X.
Neither Benioff nor Musk immediately responded to requests for comment. CNBC also reached out to Tesla, xAI and Salesforce for comment but did not hear back.
Local officials loudly opposed the idea of bringing in federal troops.
Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s district attorney, wrote on X after the Benioff interview that, “I can’t be silent any longer.”
Jenkins accused Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of turning “so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups,” and said that if anyone is using excessive force or illegally harassing residents, “I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who defeated incumbent London Breed in November in part by promising to clean up San Francisco’s streets, wrote on X on Sunday that “crime is down 30% and tent encampments are at an all-time low.” He didn’t directly address Benioff or Dreamforce, but noted that tens of thousand of people are coming to the city for activities including concerts and Fleet Week, and that public safety is critical.
“San Francisco is on the rise,” he wrote
In Benioff’s follow-up comments after his interview with the Times, the Salesforce CEO praised Lurie’s efforts to increase police hiring and retain law enforcement.
Dreamforce, which launched in 2003, kicks off on Tuesday and runs through Thursday. The event is being held at the Moscone Center and occupies much of the surrounding area in downtown San Francisco.
Garry Tan, CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X that “We don’t need the National Guard,” but he used his post to go after a frequent local target for techies: Chesa Boudin and progressives.
Boudin was district attorney in San Francisco until 2022, when he was removed in a recall election after critics railed against what they viewed as his unwillingness to prosecute violent criminals. Now the judges are the problem, Tan said.
“We need new judges who are not hardcore Chesa Boudin-style activists who work to keep drug dealers out of jail even though the police, the district attorney and the people of SF want them locked up,” he wrote. “It’s shockingly that simple in SF.”
WATCH: President Trump to activate the National Guard in Washington, D.C.
