‘Trusted friend’ of Benioff named Salesforce co-CEO
Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, announced Tuesday that it has promoted former Chief Operating Officer Bret Taylor to the role of co-CEO alongside founder Marc Benioff, effective immediately.
The move comes after Taylor played a pivotal role in the sales and marketing software company’s $27.7 billion acquisition of workplace communications company Slack last year, and elevates him from COO after gaining that title in 2019.
Former co-CEO Keith Block stepped down from the role early last year, leaving Benioff as the sole CEO at the time.
“Bret is a phenomenal industry leader who has been instrumental in creating incredible success for our customers and driving innovation throughout our company. He has been my trusted friend for years, and I couldn’t be happier to welcome him as co-CEO,” Benioff, the company’s chair and co-CEO of Salesforce, said in a statement.
Benioff has increasingly focused on philanthropy in recent years, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to local schools, hospitals and other charities.
Taylor will also take on the job of vice chair of the board for the company. He previously served as Salesforce’s chief product officer, a job Benioff appointed him to in 2017.
“Marc has been my mentor, my greatest supporter and my trusted friend for years. Partnering with him to lead the company he cofounded 22 years ago is an enormous privilege,” Taylor’s statement said.
Taylor netted a base salary of $1 million in the 2021 fiscal year, but his total compensation was in the neighborhood of $14 million overall, according to Salesforce’s 2021 proxy statement.
Taylor, 40, is a Bay Area native from Lafayette and attended Stanford before taking on roles at Google and Facebook.
He was also a cofounder of social networking site FriendFeed, which he eventually sold to Facebook.
He worked as a product manager helping build Google Maps on top of a startup the company had purchased. He joined Facebook before its market debut and was quickly named chief technology officer by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to whom he was a key adviser.
Taylor also sits on the board of Twitter, the San Francisco company that saw its own shakeup at the top Monday with the departure of founder Jack Dorsey as CEO.
He was promoted to chairman of the board at Twitter in the wake of Dorsey’s departure.
Taylor joined Salesforce in 2016 after the company acquired Quip, a company he founded that makes online document-collaboration software.
He has since been eyed as a potential future leader at Salesforce. He is seen as a protege of Benioff, who gave him dominion over what is now the largest group within Salesforce’s more than 50,000 employees, handing over jobs he’d long handled including marketing, product and engineering.
Those moves caused market watchers and trade publications to discuss him as a potential heir.
The San Francisco company employs more than 9,000 people in San Francisco and said earlier this year that most of its employees would not be required to return to work amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and evolving variants like delta and the more recent omicron.