Salesforce is the single largest employer in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff has made a name for himself as the prototypical progressive CEO. In fact, I wrote about him a few years ago when he announced in the pages of the NY Times that “Capitalism, as we know it, is dead.” Here’s a bit of what he said:

…as a capitalist, I believe it’s time to say out loud what we all know to be true: Capitalism, as we know it, is dead.

Yes, free markets — and societies that cherish scientific research and innovation — have pioneered new industries, discovered cures that have saved millions from disease and unleashed prosperity that has lifted billions of people out of poverty. On a personal level, the success that I’ve achieved has allowed me to embrace philanthropy and invest in improving local public schools and reducing homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, advancing children’s health care and protecting our oceans.

But capitalism as it has been practiced in recent decades — with its obsession on maximizing profits for shareholders — has also led to horrifying inequality.

As I pointed out at the time, Benioff wasn’t calling for full communism but he was calling for much higher taxes to fund progressive priorities.

A new capitalism must also include a tax system that generates the resources we need and includes higher taxes on the wealthiest among us. Local efforts — like the tax I supported last year on San Francisco’s largest companies to address our city’s urgent homelessness crisis — will help. Nationally, increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change.

Benioff has a national profile but in San Francisco’s he’s really been a leader as the CEO of the city’s top company and as a driving force in its politics. Here he is five years ago at the grand opening of Salesforce tower, the tallest building in the city, promising to help eliminate homelessness. “This is a solvable problem. We know that, don’t we,” he said in May of 2018.

Well, it is more than five years since he gave that speech and Salesforce no longer occupies any space in Salesforce Tower. As for solving homelessness, that hasn’t happened either. On the contrary, the problem is worse than it was in 2018. It’s difficult to be precise because the survey of the number of homeless people is only carried out every other year but it’s clearly up about 13% compared to 2017.

So with all of that in mind it’s both a bit surprising but also understandable why Marc Benioff recently warned he may need to take the largest convention the city hosts each year somewhere else because of the current street conditions.

Dreamforce is the city’s biggest convention and will bring 40,000 people to Moscone Center from Sept. 12 to 14.
“If this Dreamforce is impacted by the current situation with homelessness and drug use it may be the last Dreamforce” in the city, Benioff told the Chronicle on Tuesday…

Benioff said his company is working to ensure the Dreamforce convention is free of incidents and is a pleasant experience for attendees. He said the conference is being watched closely by the organizers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which will bring world leaders including President Biden, along with corporate CEOs to Moscone Center in November.

“We’re working hand in hand with the city as we always do,” he said. “We’ll bring a significant number of people to the city — 40,000 people — and it will generate $57 million in the downtown economy. So it’s in all of our interests for it to go well, and for APEC to go well. This should be the focus of the city.”

So not only is Benioff threatening to pull his own conference, he’s warning that another big event, APEC, is also dependent on how things go. When he says, “This should be the focus of the city,” that’s what you call a strong hint that the streets need to be better than they are right now or there will be consequences.

Is this just an idle threat? Would the city’s top progressive businessman really put his conference somewhere else next year? It’s honestly hard to imagine as it would look like he was giving up on the city, something that would generate lots and lots of headlines about the SF doom loop.

On the other hand, the fact that he’s saying this at all sort of suggests that he was overly optimistic when he said “This is a solvable problem.” It hasn’t been solved and there’s no reason to think it will be in another five years or even in Benioff’s lifetime.

I think that says something about the nature of the problem but also about the nature of the solutions being pushed in places like San Francisco. Taking more money from big companies to pour it into the cycle of addiction and theft combined with the libertarian view that destitute addicts shouldn’t have to abide by the same rules as everyone else is a dead end. Benioff still hasn’t learned that lesson, I don’t think, but maybe he is starting to realize you can kill the golden goose if you try hard enough. At some point, you just have to leave the mess behind and run a business.