The Benioff question

The Benioff question

Peter A. Hempel

Mark Benioff, the head of Salesforce, a major business software firm, has his corporate headquarters in San Francisco. Recently, he made news when he asked President. Trump to send the military into the city to deal with the crime situation. The head of his corporate foundation resigned in protest, and Benioff has since withdrawn his request.

I know there are a lot of immediate reactions that people will have to this. No, just no. Don’t even think about it.

That was certainly my immediate reaction. Obviously, I loathe Trump and pretty much everything he does.

Then, as I began to think about this some more, I began to try looking at it from a somewhat different perspective.

I have no particular feelings about Benioff one way or the other, but let’s start with the fact that he is running a major business software company with its headquarters in what has become an extremely troubled city. Homelessness and drug users have made downtown San Francisco a place where I would rather not be.

Even a few decades ago, when I was in San Francisco for business, I was staying in an upscale hotel downtown, a few blocks from what I believe may have been the Tenderloin District? It was an area which should have been fun for tourists, but there were so many panhandlers, you couldn’t walk a block without being accosted multiple times. Certainly there were places nearby that were less troubled – I assume Sausalito was fine – but I don’t think I would have enjoyed having to commute into work at one of the downtown offices (I was commuting into New York for work every day). That was quite some time ago; everything I have read suggests that things have gotten way worse since then.

Benioff has a large staff of tech and business-savvy workers who I assume are well-paid, and who would be attractive to other companies as well. Moreover, in choosing to locate his headquarters downtown, he is making a statement of sorts of support for the city. It would be perfectly easy for him to set up shop in Silicon Valley instead.

I assume he has donated money to efforts to improve things, but there is a serious limit to what he can accomplish that way. He doesn’t have the resources to house the undomiciled, to change the (de facto?) policy of “catch and release” for shoplifters, to deal with the problem of Fentanyl and other drugs and zoned-out druggies in the street, etc. Many of these issues can only be addressed through legislation and public policy – and substantial public funding. And, from what I can gather, San Francisco is still one of those “defund the police” areas, where “progressive” political sensibilities stand very much in the way of dealing with these problems. (There is also plenty of NIMBYism standing in the way of creating substantial amounts of new housing.)

I know there is a constant mantra that “violence is not the solution.” Call me somewhat undecided on that. I look at the case of Luigi Mangione and his assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, which, under Thompson’s profit-seeking directives (for which he was paid millions of dollars by the company), had been methodically denying claims for service by Luigi and other healthcare clients. Where could Luigi turn for help? Obviously, national legislation was needed to change this situation. But both sides of the aisle in Congress have been bought and paid for by the health insurance industry. Aside from Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and AOC, the landscape is bleak indeed.

There was literally no one to turn to. And guess what? After Thompson’s assassination, there was a huge wave of attention in the media and denial of service by health insurance companies. United Healthcare got a new CEO, and I believe the situation improved somewhat. At least there was more pressure on the industry about the whole denial of service situation.

So, here is Mark Benioff in San Francisco, a city that has become profoundly dysfunctional, and where local officials have neither the resources nor the inclination to change policy and address these problems. (Remember when Portland’s progressive City Council decriminalized all drugs? It did not go well.)

California as a whole, with its relatively benign climate and liberal social attitudes, has attracted a disproportionate number of homeless people overall, which leaves it overwhelmed by the challenges of trying to fix problems that grow out a very large set of issues in society at large. And with Trump at the helm, and the Republicans in charge in Washington, they have been cutting any kind of aid to the states – even federal disaster relief. This is not the age of Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society programs. This is the dystopian opposite.

I met a guy in Princeton some years ago, who had lived with his family in New York before that. They lived in some sort of brownstone apartment or whatever on one of those streets in the 30s or 40s, that was located down the block from a homeless shelter or soup kitchen or something of the sort. So, as you might expect, there was a certain amount of drug usage and the like. Anyway, one morning, he was getting ready to take his kids to school, and when he tried to open the front door, he found it blocked by a dead body. I think that may have been one of the reasons he moved to Princeton.

Ideally, homelessness, drug abuse, etc., would be addressed by Great Society-style programs, funded by making the rich actually pay their fair share – like back in the good old days when I was a kid and the top marginal tax rate was 90%.

But none of that is happening, and all the money in the system is directed to making the rich richer, not helping the cities or anyone else.

So, Benioff wanted Trump to send in the troops. I can see why he might have been feeling that way. What else was left? This is exactly the kind of environment that Trump thrives in, one that is so bad that people would rather have authoritarianism since nothing else is working.

Thoughts?

©Peter A. Hempel – 10/19/25