In 1999 the idea sounded absurd. Marc Benioff co-founded Salesforce to deliver business software over the internet as a subscription, instead of shipping discs that an IT department installed on servers it owned and maintained.

That is now simply how software is bought. Software-as-a-service became the default, and Salesforce rode the model it helped invent into being one of the largest enterprise-software companies in the world.

Before the cloud was obvious, he was already declaring the end of software as everyone knew it.

He expands by acquisition, aggressively, and he markets with a showman's instinct — the End of Software campaign included staged protests outside a rival's conference. He is also loud and consistent about corporate responsibility and stakeholder capitalism.

Philanthropy and media ownership extended the reach beyond software. But the thing that mattered was being early and certain about the cloud when almost nobody else was, which changed how every business on earth now consumes technology.

Benioff grew up in San Francisco, wrote and sold video games through his own small company as a teenager, and studied business at the University of Southern California. He spent thirteen years at Oracle, becoming one of its youngest vice-presidents, before leaving to start Salesforce with Parker Harris and two other engineers in a rented San Francisco flat.

Salesforce listed in 2004. Its larger acquisitions include MuleSoft in 2018 for about 6.5 billion dollars, Tableau in 2019 for about 15.7 billion and Slack in 2021 for about 27.7 billion. In 2018 Benioff and his wife, Lynne, personally bought Time magazine for 190 million dollars.

He devised the 1-1-1 model, under which a company gives one per cent of its equity, product and employee time to charity, and Salesforce adopted it from the start. In 2023 activist investors pushed the company to cut costs and lift margins, which it did through layoffs and by disbanding the board's mergers committee. Benioff has since recast Salesforce around AI agents through its Agentforce platform.