Benioff spending blitz shakes up Prop. C fight
Salesforce founder Marc Benioff has poured a combined $7.9 million in personal and corporate money into the effort to pass Proposition C, the San Francisco ballot measure that would nearly double city spending on homeless services by increasing taxes on the city’s largest corporations, including Salesforce itself.
Salesforce reported nearly $5.9 million in contributions as of Monday, while Benioff was personally in for $2 million, including a $1 million drop just days ago. That makes him and his company the prime movers be-
hind Prop. C, which has also raised another $500,000 from small donors.
“Our city is in a crisis,” Benioff said in an interview this week. “A crisis of cleanliness, a crisis of inequity and inaction ... and we can’t just sit by anymore.”
Early on, Benioff had signaled support for the measure, but no one expected the tech billionaire to get so deeply involved, including the Prop C. campaign itself.
“I didn’t know I was going to be on conference calls with Salesforce every morning,” said Prop. C campaign manager Jim Stearns, who now finds himself in a role reversal, with four times as much money as the business community that opposes the measure — it has raised $1.9 million total.
The unexpected surge in both cash and personal interest from Benioff has prompted an all-out media onslaught by the measure’s backers in the last days of the campaign. It includes print, billboards, street canvassing, TV, radio and digital advertising, including ads in both the Chinese- and Spanishlanguage media.
The campaign has also taken advantage of Benioff being both the head of Salesforce — the city’s largest employer — and its most generous hometown philanthropist by featuring him in at least one citywide mailer.
“We were all wondering how you could spend this much money in the final two weeks of a campaign — well, now we are seeing it,” said Chamber of Commerce Vice President Jim Lazarus, who is part of the business coalition opposing Prop. C and its $300 million annual tax hike.
“They are spending any way they can between now and next Tuesday,” Lazarus said. “They are even on billboards outside of the city.”
It’s not the first time big money has played a hand at the local ballot.
The soda industry, for example, poured $19.3 million in 2016 into its unsuccessful fight to beat back a local tax on sugary drinks, with former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg pumping in $9.7 million in support. Airbnb spent $8 million to knock back home-sharing regulations put on the 2015 ballot. And utility giant PG&E spent $10 million in 2008 to successfully defeat a proposed public power measure.
Individuals such as tech investor Ron Conway have pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money into local campaigns over the years.
But no single person has used more of his combined personal and corporate wealth to influence so directly the outcome of a single ballot measure than Benioff has with Prop. C.
And Benioff has planted himself front and center in the campaign, including his social media blast at billionaire Twitter founder Jack Dorsey for opposing the measure, accusing Dorsey of accepting business tax breaks from San Francisco but not giving back to the city philanthropically.
Campaign manager Stearns said the Yes on Prop. C messaging has focused on three points: explaining how the money would be used, explaining who is paying the tax (namely big corporations and not the public) and working to dispel criticism that there will be little accountability of how the money is spent.
Lazarus said the No on Prop. C campaign is focused on that last issue as well.
“It means a total budget set-aside of $682 million a year, with no accountability on how the money will be spent,” he said, referring to the combination of current city spending plus new Prop. C tax funds.
The Benioff blitz also caught Mayor London Breed, who has come out against the measure, off guard. Sources in her camp say had she known just how heavily involved Benioff would be, she might have stayed neutral and avoided spending her political capital on what may very well be the losing side.
Benioff is not without his critics, who point to a New York Times article in June where he said, “There are some people in San Francisco who are intentionally homeless. They just want to be homeless. San Francisco is kind of the Four Seasons of homelessness. They all say this is the best place in the world to be homeless.”
Regardless, Benioff said he has been consistent since the opening of the new Salesforce Tower in the spring in saying it will take hundreds of millions of dollars in immediate investment to deal with the homeless issue, which has made San Francisco the subject of widespread scorn and ridicule.
“And I still believe that,” Benioff said.
And if Prop. C is flawed, he said, it “is the best we have — there is nothing else, there is no other option.” In theory, the measure requires only 50 percent plus one vote to pass. But some City Hall insiders have speculated that the real aim of Benioff ’s massive spending is to propel the measure over the twothirds mark, thus avoiding a legal challenge that has already tied up earlier local tax measures that failed to reach that higher threshold.
Polling and the still well-funded opposition suggest, however, that even Benioff ’s big bucks won’t lift Prop. C over the twothirds mark.
On the personal side, critics also speculate that Benioff might be using the campaign to set himself up for a political run for mayor, governor or even higher office.
Political consultant Sean Clegg, whose SNC Strategies firm represents both Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, but which doesn’t have a stake in Prop. C, predicted a Benioff win and “a big embarrassment for London Breed.”
“What he has done is going to make him a profile in courage for the rest of his life — being a traitor to his class,” Clegg said. “We might see his name in the future for governor or mayor.”
On that point, however, Benioff is firm.
“I will never run for political office,” he said.