Tech billionaire Marc Benioff is facing pushback over his support for President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops to San Francisco.
Ron Conway, a longtime Democratic donor and a board member for the Salesforce Foundation, resigned his position at Benioff’s company last week. Conway declared his resignation in an email directly to Benioff, the Salesforce CEO.
“It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway wrote to Benioff, according to a copy of the email obtained by the San Francisco Standard.
“I have expressed candidly to you, repeatedly, in recent days, that I am shocked and disappointed by your comments calling for an unwanted invasion of San Francisco by federal troops, and by your willful ignorance and detachment from the impacts of the ICE immigration raids of families with NO criminal record, efforts to gerrymander elections, attacks on freedom of speech, and other unlawful policies,” Conway’s message continued.
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A Salesforce spokesperson thanked Conway for his time on the board but did not address the debate in a statement.
“We have deep gratitude for Ron Conway and his incredible contributions to the Salesforce Foundation Board for over a decade,” the spokesperson told the Standard.
Benioff revealed his support for Trump’s troop deployments in an interview with the New York Times earlier this month.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if [the National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said.
“I fully support the president,” he added. “I think he’s doing a great job.”
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Benioff’s comments came a week before his annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. He complained to the Times that he has to pay out of pocket for off-duty police officers to bolster security in the convention area every year.
The friendly words for Trump are an about-face for the California billionaire, however, having spent decades funneling tens of millions of dollars toward left-wing activist groups.
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