Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Tuesday that next month’s Dreamforce conference could be the last that he holds in San Francisco because of the growing problems of homelessness and drugs in the city, leading to rampant crime.
Benioff made his threat in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:
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.
The comments came during an interview about Salesforce’s $1 million donation to a Salvation Army’s program that aids homeless people. Benioff and his company previously poured money to support San Francisco’s 2018 Proposition C tax on major companies that now raises millions of dollars per year for homeless services.
San Francisco is already experiencing an exodus of major retailers, with a flagship Nordstrom location closing in the downtown area this week, due to the “dynamics” of the downtown area. Many other major retail stores have closed, thanks in part to a decline in foot traffic due to the pandemic-era shift to work-from-home, but also due to crime, including mass looting, that has plagued both high-end and low-end retail stores in the center of the city.
Benioff, a former Hillary Clinton donor who said in 2020 that he had abandoned political donations, has also threatened to pull his business out of Republican-run states that have passed socially conservative laws on abortion.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
