Marc Benioff on Elon, AI Agents, and the “DOGE”

Hi, Kara.

Hey, how you doing? I'm doing great. I'm just rolling in here.
Give me a second. Can you prove my beauty here? I don't think it's possible.
Oh, God. Thank you.
Just tell me when you're ready, pretty. Hi, everyone.
From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Mark Benioff, again, the CEO of Salesforce.
I've known him since the last century. I've interviewed him, I don't know, dozens of times.
I can't remember where I first met him, but I believe he annoyed me on some level. I think he was working for Oracle or somewhere else.
But he's a really interesting entrepreneur, and he hasn't changed a lot. The only thing he did that I refused to do is meditate with him, which I declined, and we got in an argument.
We've been arguing ever since. But we've gotten a lot of disagreements on and off the mic, but we've always agreed on value stuff for the most part.
I thought he was very brave when it came to LGBTQ issues in Indiana many years ago. That said, we also argue about lots of things like how Elon Musk has become a toxic force.
He always looks for the good in people. I look for maybe they could be better.
But anyway, right now he's evangelizing for what he's calling the adjantic era. I think that's the correct way of pronouncing it.
It sounds familiar because we've been talking about it a lot. In September, Salesforce came out with their own autonomous AI agents.
They're calling it agent force. Everything is for something with him.
It can be built on top of their existing customer relationship management platform, which is rather robust, and it's already given their business a huge boon. Their last quarter earnings report just came out last week, and it was really very good.
And he had been struggling for a little bit there, and it sent their stock soaring. Mark also seems to be leaning into the new Elon Trump era.
He's been something of an Elon fan, but now he's calling him the Edison of our era and posting on X about getting rid of government bureaucracy. I think he's been a little bit overboard, so I wanted to talk with him about his thoughts on the Department of Government Efficiency and whether he's worried about Elon exerting undue power in the market.
And by the way, Mark wrote about his agentic era in an essay in Time magazine, which he bought in 2018. Like so many tech moguls, they're really deep into media.
So our expert question today comes from former CNN media critic Oliver Darcy. He now writes his own media news and analysis newsletter, which I love, called Status, and he's got a great question.
I also wanted to talk to Mark about Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube, who is a close friend and colleague of both of ours. She died earlier this year.
She was also on the board of

Salesforce. She's a person I have long valued in Silicon Valley, and there are precious fewer of

her as the years go on and more of the toxic brand. And so I want to talk to her about that.
support for on the caris fisher comes from sacks fifth avenue

sax.com is personalized, and that can be a huge help when you need something real nice, real fast. So if there's a Totem jacket you like, now Saks.com can show you the best Totem jackets, as well as similar styles from brands you might not have even thought to check out.
Saks.com can even let you know when the Gucci loafers you've been eyeing are back in stock

or when new work blazers from the row arrive.

Who doesn't like easy, personalized shopping that saves you time?

Head to Saks.com.

Have you noticed that headlights seem brighter these days?

It's more than just a nuisance for some people. Those headlights and other LED lights knocked me out of being a teacher.
I just, I couldn't get to work anymore without suffering these impacts, these neurological, psychological impacts. The dark side of those gleaming headlights.
That's this week on Explain It To Me. Listen every Sunday morning, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a podcast about tech and media and what happens when they collide. And this week, we're talking about the symbiosis, the codependency between big time sports and big TV.
And what's going to happen to that equation as the TV industry gets smaller and smaller and smaller. On to explain it all is the veteran sports business journalist, John O'Ran.
That's this week on channels from the Vox Media Podcast Network. It is on.
So, Mark, we meet again. We meet again from our last go-round, which was public, I think, in a live space.
Sarah, we have had a lot of good times together. We have.
We have. So last time we spoke was at the Upfront Summit, where you took all of your note cards and said the next time we'd be consulting chat GPT.
Do you have that ready, feeding you your answers right now? Oh, I could do that. Do you want me to? No, I don't.
I actually am amusing. I've been really enjoying Gemini.
Oh, tell me why. And the Gemini app.
Really, tell me. What a good question that is to ask.
Tell me why that. Why are you picking that over Claude or any of the others? I really love this.
Like, hey, tell me everything about Kara Swisher. Is she amazing or what? Uh-huh.
And whathuh and what's the response to add two numbers together you just need to say them both for example i think it got a little confused yeah it always does it always does hey you tell me everything you know about kara swisher is she amazing or what car swisher is definitely a major player in tech journals. Yeah, she is.
She's super well-known for her. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. Don't suck up to me, Mark.
It's not going to work. Anyway, let me.
Kara, it's not me. It's Gemini trying to suck up to you.
Google wants your full attention. Is there others you use? What are the ones you use? What are the? I've moved to Gemini.
Why? I love the voice. It's like no latency voice.

It's amazing.

Right, okay.

And just being able to talk about it.

So when I'm not using Salesforce's agent force, I'm using Gemini.

Okay.

So let's talk about your recent earnings report.

It came out Tuesday.

You texted me immediately.

Sales in the quarter ending October 31st jumped 8.3% to 9.44 billion.

So you beat analyst expectations. Subscription revenue was up 9% year over year, bringing in $8.88 billion.
Stocks soared on the news up 9%, hitting a high. So congratulations.
So how much do you attribute those numbers to an AI boost, would you say? Well, I think all of it is, you know, about AI right now. I think that agent force is really the most exciting thing I've ever done.
I've never been more excited about my career and what's happening in technology. And it's just amazing.
One of the reasons that I was a few minutes late for this interview is I was on the phone with a customer of mine in Copenhagen, of all places. But my job was to really explain to him what an agentic layer is.
And I don't think he'd ever even heard of an agentic layer. We'll get to agentic in a minute, but go ahead.
That idea that agents can really accelerate his business. And I am having this conversation day and night with chief executives and actually all kinds of people all over the world to really explain the power of agents because we've now shipped this to all 135,000 Salesforce customers.
Right. And they can just flip it on with a light switch and I think transform their business.
Agent Force, that's the Agent Force. You came out with this new platform in September.
Explain what it is and how it works. Now, everybody's sticking AI on the front of their companies and it's not always the case.
Well, what we've done is something really unusual, and I guess I'll use my own example to start. You know, of course, we use Salesforce to run Salesforce, and we have 9,000 people in customer support.
We have 135,000 customers, and it's very important for us to have a great customer support experience for all of them. And we have a site where customers start their customer journey with us called help.salesforce.com.
And then if they aren't able to kind of resolve their issue, we can get on the phone with them and do all kinds of things, help remotely administer their system, et cetera. So we moved help.salesforce.com to AgentForce.
And what that does is it delivers it as an agent. So kind of like ChatGPT or Gemini, but grounded, which means connected into your data, into your customer data and all the information we know about you and your company.
How is that different? You had Einstein co-pilots. Were you trying to avoid name confusion with Microsoft co-pilot? Or how is it different, Agent Force? Well, that's for sure one major issue that people think co-pilots don't work because Microsoft has done such a horrible job with their co-pilot.
We'll get into that. Let's put that issue aside for a second, because I think with Agent Force, it is different in that this is an agentic layer.
That is, it's an agent. That is, you're actually collaborating with what seems to almost be like a human being, but it's not.
It's like a digital worker. It's digital labor.
You know, for the last 25 years at Salesforce, we've been helping companies manage and share their information, keep track of their customer information. Now we're providing digital workers.
So these are now support agents on the front end, helping to resolve these customer issues. And they're pretty good.
They have very high levels of accuracy, very low hallucinogenic, and they're basically letting me now rebalance my labor in my company. So I'm able to move support people now to become salespeople.
It's very exciting. So you mentioned Microsoft.
I'd be remiss because it's always been one of your biggest competitors. You've been going after them pretty hard.
You've called the new Microsoft Copilot 365 Clippy 2.0. For those who don't know, Clippy was their little bouncing paperclip that was a disaster.
That was a good one. That was a good one.
You said that Microsoft is deceiving customers. It's not just Microsoft.
You've been ranting about AI priests delivering false prophecies. Yes.
Now you're talking about Agent Force working so well. Explain why people— Yes, you're not the only witty person in the tech industry, Cara.
Yes, I understand that. But explain why people should believe your Kool-Aid is not laced as everybody else's.
Just saying. Well, they should talk to our customers.
I mean, I think that when we have success with AgentForce, we're talking about how we've transformed companies. I'll give you an example.
Wiley, you know, this amazing textbook company. They probably made some of the books behind me.
And so they usually are, like, staffing up with all these additional sales and service workers for a couple months. And they're not doing that this year because we provided them digital labor, what we call agent force.
And that gave them the ability to start selling and servicing without hiring more people. And it's been super successful for them.
What are you talking about when you're talking about AI priests, Microsoft deceiving customers? What are you implying? That's pretty clear, but what is your implication? Yeah, well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world, and Microsoft is the first. And one of the things that has happened in the last two years is Microsoft has come out with this product called Copilot.
But if you talk to our customers and ask them what they're using it for, you'll find out Microsoft Copilot is really a flop. It's really disappointed so many customers, way more than any other Microsoft product that's ever existed.
And I thought that was hard to have happen, but they've done it again. And the reason why is they just repackaged Sam Altman's product, which is ChatGPT, and it's not very good.
And I think the real value for AI for companies is digital labor. So, just last year, Microsoft spent more than $55 billion on CapEx, mostly to boost AI.
Analysts estimate. It's a lot more than I spent.
Yes, I know. I'm going to make that point.
Analysts estimate the company will spend $80 to $90 billion on it in 2025. Salesforce's CapEx this year was a fraction of that, less than, I think, $620 million.
You said you weren't planning to increase spending to build that AI. I'd love to understand why, and let me just follow.
Andreessen Horowitz published a blog post titled Death of a Salesforce, basically that incumbents, meaning you, shouldn't feel too comfortable if they aren't investing heavily in AI. So talk a little bit about this, because are you spending enough or why aren't you spending? And are you concerned that companies are going to cut spending on your products, your enterprise applications, and replace it with others? So, you know, Salesforce has been doing artificial intelligence for about more than a decade, I would say.
And most people know us for our Einstein platform, which was our first version of artificial intelligence that's evolving very rapidly into agent force. This week, we will do more than 2 trillion transactions, artificial intelligence transactions on our platform.
And that's predictive, it's machine learning, it's machine intelligence, it's generative, and it's agent force. So 2 trillion transactions, that's more than any other enterprise provider in the world.
And the reason why we don't have those CapEx expenditures is two reasons. One is our models are incredibly efficient.
Two out of the top models in the industry were written at Salesforce. We have an incredible AI team that has done amazing work.
Even prompt engineering itself was invented at Salesforce in 2018. A tremendous amount of the deep learning work came out of Salesforce and our research team and a huge amount of generative and some of these incredible new models.
But we do things a little differently. The way we train, the way we write the software.
And also, we tend to use other people's data centers. So we will use Amazon and Google and others and not rely on too much of our own hardware, which we, although we have some, it's not our philosophy.
So you don't need to spend, the spending gulf is enormous. Talk about why do we, I mean, there is an enormous spending situation going on with these companies.
It's not clear if they're going to make it back, but they feel they need to make these massive investments. Yeah, it's the same message we have to our customers.
Like, we were just talking about Disney, you love my shirt. But Disney is also not spending more on CapEx because they rely on us.
And the way we've architected our platform is we don't have to buy hardware and, you know, all kinds of AI training systems. You don't have to suck up to NVIDIA, for example.
We love NVIDIA. They're a great customer and partner of ours.
And I love Jensen. I love his philosophies.
But I think that we have a really, really exciting strategy. And you can see how it played out.
And our numbers were incredible. By the way, we did $38 billion in revenue.
And we're going to deliver about 33% in our margins this year, $13 billion in cash flow. Which is a lot better than previous years, which you were struggling a little bit.
But what is the- These are incredible numbers. What about the spending? How do you look at the massive amounts of fundraising, spending, and everything else that's going on? I think in some cases it's excessive.
And I think also in some cases it's becoming a race to the bottom for some of these companies. Why is companies.
So while there is a big movement of a lot of companies into these kind of public clouds, I think that we have to be careful exactly how much we're investing. And you can see it even in the energy use, I think, also has to be managed.
We're seeing companies even buy nuclear power plants to run their data centers. This is really an unusual development.
Where will the spending go? Oh, I think they're going to keep spending. And? And it's going to be expensive for them and it's going to drive their margins down.
Okay. And you just want to ride on top of that.
That's what you're essentially saying. And I'm going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better and lower cost and easier for my customers.
Yeah. Right.
Okay. So you call it this word, agentic.
Sachin Adele of Microsoft also calls agentic. It's agent, essentially.
It's agents. So when you reallocate these funds and you drift into AI, does that, you know, I've been talking to a lot of CEOs lately like you who are sort of using the AI and are not going to be making the AI necessarily.
And they think they're going to cut half their workforce. They're going to cut all kinds of people.
How are you re-engineering Salesforce itself? Yeah, well, those were our aggressive numbers, and I have never heard numbers like that before. But I do think you're going to be rebalancing your workforce.
And, you know, the AI is not, we're not an AGI, you know. Yeah.
We have very good AI, but it's not sentient. So I have seen the movies, but that's not where we are yet.
I would say that we have an opportunity, though, to rebalance our workforce because there is a percentage of things that our employees have been doing that can now be done by our software. And that's exciting because I have a lot of things that need to get done that are not getting done, and I'm going to rebalance my employees over to those functions.
To those functions. So getting back to Microsoft, they've invested, as you noted, heavily in OpenAI.
Microsoft's connection with OpenAI is something the FTC is actually looking into right now. You recently made a couple of offhand remarks about gen AI not curing cancer, which have been interpreted as digs, I guess, Sam Altman and OpenAI.
And you've also directed criticism. No, no, I'm not attacking any one particular person.
And I love Sam Altman, and he's a great person and a great leader of the San Francisco tech community. What I really have a problem with is when people mischaracterize where AI is today.
And I think AI is very cool, but we just saw a good example where I am working with AI even in our interview here, and we could see sometimes it gets it right and sometimes it gets it wrong. We all have that experience.
And that's the reality of where we are right now. And we haven't cured cancer.
We haven't stopped climate change. And while AI may help us get there in the future, I think it's possible, but we should be really grounded right now, to use an AI term, in today's reality of what's possible.
But you're using, Einstein is using OpenAI's LLMs, correct? What is your collaboration with a company like that look like? And how do you figure out who to collaborate with? We use many models of the front, what they call the frontier models, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. There's a lot of choices.
Cohere, we're investors, and some of them were investors. You invested in Fei-Fei Li's new AI company, for example.
Personally, I'm an advisor, and I've been investing. And her husband runs my research at Salesforce, Silvio.
And I would say that there's so many exciting things going on. But today, you have a lot of choices on how to, what to plug in, but we also have built a lot of our own custom models and our own specialized AI as well inside Salesforce.
So it's, it's a little bit of a hybrid. So we're many things that Salesforce do, and we don't want our customers to have to worry about any of that.
We don't want them to DIY, which means do it yourself AI, you know, and we're helping them build their own models. And if they already have a model, they can bring that model.

It's called, you know, they can bring their own model into Salesforce.

So we think of models are changing and evolving very fast.

Fei-Fei Li's company is a good example.

You know, she's building a new world model.

You know, the idea that there's going to be a lot of different ways

to understand the world through AI.

Like, for example, the model that we just used in the phone example doesn't have a time-space understanding. Like, it only operates in the current time and the current space.
Her models are independent of time and space and geography and can do things that other models cannot do today. Even though there's a cornucopia of spending happening, and so you have a lot of choices, and you're riding off of their rails, essentially, do you worry about it being only a few big companies that you will be subject to just three or four? No, I don't believe that at all.
Tell me why. Because you're not worried about concentration in power.
Well, there's a lot of good choices right now. You go for a little French company if you like the French.
You know, I myself am a member of the French Foreign Legion, you know, so I will be a big advocate for France. Mestral is a great model.
It is. That's the French company.
There are many great models. And there's kind of a competition, like who's the best model, they're all fighting it out.
But right now, that current generation model is also starting to crest a little bit. You hear that there's an innovation ceiling that they're hitting on the current technology.
This is very common where all of a sudden it looks like this and then it gets stabilized at the top. And that's not the first time this has happened in our industry, not just with models, but with technology.
And then it tends to commoditize while we wait for the next model. And then we go through sometimes what we call an AI winter.
So the model will kind of get mature, and then everybody's kind of at the same level. Then the price gets rationalized.
Then things start to slow down, and then we wait for the next great idea to emerge. We'll be back in a minute.
Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com, to talk about the 2024 election. That can't be right.
Eric, I thought we were done with that. I feel like I'm Pacino in three.
Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened.
So the full picture is starting to just come into view now. And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the Internet.
What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research. He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party.
And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are on today explained, you'll have to go listen to them there. Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro.
You joked in our last interview that I'd be voting for Trump and you would be voting for Elon, sort of kind of like you did on X. You recently called him the Edison of our time.
By the way, Edison was not a very nice person, FYI. You also sent congrats to President-elect Trump and wrote the time of great promise for our nation.

A lot of CEOs did this.

I'm not giving you a hard time for that.

Have you flipped in your thing?

Because you supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Obama before her.

I think you were a Biden supporter, as I recall.

Have you shifted allegiances like so many other people?

You forgot to mention that I was in the Bush administration also as the chairman of the PTAC.

Yes, except for your great Elon love. You've been pretty quiet, but go ahead.
I would say you have a couple, two things that I want to directly address it. Number one is that when I bought Time Magazine in 2018, I agreed with management, maybe incorrectly, but I agreed nonetheless that I would no longer fund any political party or campaign.
And I would not endorse any political candidate. Yeah.
So I've been remarkably neutral and down the middle. I mean, some of the things that I believe in, I believe in innovation.
I mean, you know the things I believe in. I believe in trust.
I believe in customer success, innovation, equality. I believe in sustainability.
And I also believe in fiscal responsibility. I also believe very strongly in the balanced budget.
It's one of the reasons that brought me to the Bush administration is the idea of something that is what we used to call budget neutral, which really is a balanced budget, something we've gotten away from in the country. These are a lot of the things that I believe in.
You know that Trump was the worst defender of that, but go ahead. Go ahead.
Numbers. I am not endorsing anybody, but I do think when someone is elected president, we should want the best for our country and our best for our president.
You don't want them to crash into a tree, all of us into a tree with us. I agree that we should, you and I, I think, could agree on that one point.
Yes, one point. Which is that we should all be as supportive as we can for our country and our president.
Right. And so do you feel, Mark Zuckerberg just went to Mar-a-Lago.
I know you didn't go to that famous meeting in 2016. You and I talked about it in the Trump Tower tech leaders meeting.
And I believe you weren't invited, I think, as the Trump people told me. I think we were too small at that point.
Was it? We weren't the second largest software company at that point. Right.
I think they said you were too liberal to me. I think that's what they told me.
But do you feel like you have to do the visit and sit there and listen to YMCA with him while eating lunch? Look, if I was invited, I would go. I went, actually, in the first Trump administration.
You'll find photos of me. I've met with him several times.
And of course, I would support him and what he's trying to do as the president of the United States, especially if it aligns with what I'm doing. But one thing that I've noticed is that, and I've worked with five or six presidents now and six administrations or something, that presidents are changing, but I'm not changing.
My core values aren't changing. My company and who we are has not changed.
And we're going through this. We're also a large supplier to the U.S.
government. So that is something that's very important to us as a company, that the U.S.
government is successful. Right, right.
That makes sense. Someone who did change was Elon, who's gone, as you and I both know, has changed rather dramatically in his point of view.
He has. There's no question.
You have not. I will agree with you there.
Have you worried about, you know, he's now the BFF or the best buddy to Trump? I thought he was the vice president at this point. I mean, he feels like it.
Honestly, he feels like the president. Honestly, that's what he feels like.
But what's amazing? What's amazing to you? Well, I mean, I think it is amazing that we are having somebody who you could call him the Hedison of our time. I have.
That's because I find him to be very inventive, creative. I think it's amazing how he runs all these companies.
I say to him all the time, I don't understand how you can run all these companies. I can barely run two.
So, you know, it's incredible what he has done. We could go through his list of accomplishments.
I do. I think, unlike you, I try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I see.

I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You know what?

I kind of go back and forth on that.

I'm trying to save the fucking baby, Mark.

But go ahead.

Go ahead.

So I want the bathwater gone, the fetid, racist, anti-immigrant bathwater gone.

But go ahead.

Go ahead.

Keep going.

So, you know, Kara, you know that you and I align on a lot of things. And I would just say that in this one area, I am much more about innovation.
And I think that, hey, if we can bring a little innovation to the United States of America, that's only going to make us stronger and better. Are you worried about him using his political how to influence the tech market, especially AI? I mean, he could be a kingmaker here.
He has an AI company. Obviously, there's some conflict of interest.
He's suing OpenAI. And Sam Altman told The Times it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to hurt your competitors and advantage your own business.
How do you feel with a single tech person being in that position? I know the people at Meta are worried. I know a lot of these companies are worried.
Well, one thing I've learned when presidents are running for office and how they operate in office is that it usually is two different things. And this is, I think, something that we get collective amnesia around, that what you say to get elected doesn't tend to be the reality when you're actually in office and actually have to manage something or run something.
What are, though, the implications of something like Elon, who is unelected? He just spent a lot of money and got Trump elected. I do believe he was critical to that.
He can tweet and run and ruin the people in a day. Is that worrisome to you in any way? It can be, but I think, you know, we are still at the beginning of this, and I think that I don't think there should be judgment made.
I think it's okay to have judgment once we get in and we're going, and then we can say this went well and this did not go well. I think that in all cases, there will be things that work and things that did not work.
And I don't care who you are as a leader. That is going to be something that you're going to be subjected to.
You talked about family values at Salesforce all the time. Last time, you pushed back on the idea that you were a woke CEO, but you have put your neck out for LGBTQ issues in the past, like taking a stand against anti-gay laws in Indiana.
You and your wife have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to climate issues. One of the things I said when I interviewed you, you said, you see the good in people, not the dark parts.
But some of it is very dark. And I'll focus on some Elon quotes, for example.
I call you and I want to see the dark parts in people. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. I know how to call a friend.
I think you need to see them. But he said, no, for example, Elon said the woke mind virus killed his child, Vivian, and he refuses to use her new name and gender.
A video from his pack began, Kamala is the C word. The ad flashed over an image of cat with a meow sound.
It was obviously referring to not communists. He reposted an interesting observation that women are incapable of independent thought that only alpha males should make policy decisions.
The anti-immigrant conspiracies are all over the place. And Trump also reflects those.
How do you still see the good in people when some of this is extraordinarily dark? We're going to keep having this debate, but how do you not react to that? Let me tell you the part that's not a debate, and let's start there.

There's two parts.

First is my part as the CEO of Salesforce and then who I am as a person.

So number one, as the CEO of Salesforce, there are parts of our world that can get very dark and toxic for our employees.

We have 75,000 people.

Salesforce is a large company.

We just went through that. We have offices in every major city, state, and country in the world.
And we will have employees who end up in a state or a country or a city or with a mayor, a president, a governor, whatever, that they feel they're being discriminated against, and they will call me. And we have a lot of stories around that.
You and I have gone through them for more than a decade. And I would say that in those cases, I will say to this, to those employees, number one, I have your back.
I'm your CEO. I have a huge responsibility.
You are working for us. We're going to take care of you.
I know that you work 24 seven for Salesforce. I'm going to make sure we take care of you.
And if you are

unhappy right now or feel like you are threatened or in danger or that you're in a toxic environment, I'll do what I can politically for you. But in some cases, there's not a lot I can do, but I can move you.
And I have moved more than 300 employees. So in those cases where those employees feel that they are in a situation that is no longer tenable for them, I will get them on an airplane and their family and get them into a safe environment.
And that is the number one thing I can do for them. For them as an employer.
On the second side, what I can do, well, let's say Salesforce for a second. When we started Salesforce 25 years ago, you know this story.
We put 1% of our equity, profit, and time into a 501c3 charity foundation. It was very easy because we had no employees, shareholders, or anybody.
And today that foundation has given away more than a billion dollars. It runs more than 50,000 nonprofits for free on our service.
And also we've done 10 million hours of volunteerism. These are approximate numbers, but it's scaled and it's been incredible.
Right. So this is your acting by...
Our public safety. This is what we do at the company.
Rather than speaking out against some of these comments. You know this because you've been there and you saw this as real over 25 years.
Is it impossible? The second piece is me personally, I've also given away more than a billion dollars to the public hospitals, the public schools, the public parks, public safety, the environment. You know, I love the Trillion Trees, which I started with Trump.
The Oceans, I have an ocean lab at UCSB.

Two children's hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, and three hospitals in Hawaii, which I love very much.

And that's what I do also.

And so this is who I am.

It's all out in the public.

There's no mystery.

But is it impossible for public company CEOs now

to be, do you think you could have done the thing you did in Ohio today without real repercussions

in Indiana? Yeah. Excuse me, not Ohio.
Yeah, it's not Ohio, it's Indiana. So let's talk about what

happened, and there's so much confusion about that, and I think it's extremely important

for the current time, but also for the LGBTQ community. So you might remember that what was

Thank you. about that.
And I think it's extremely important for the current time, but also for the LGBTQ community. So you might remember that what was happening was the governor at the time did sign a law against the LGBT community.
And I know him very well. And I called him and I said, why did you do that? Because now I'm going to have to disinvest and not be able to hire as many people and bring customers there.

And he's like, let's talk about this.

And we actually resolved it and negotiated something within a couple of days.

But we did have to get involved, and we did have to work it out.

Could you do that? And 200 companies joined us.

Mark, I have admiration.

Major Indiana companies. I have admiration, but could you do that today? Would you be worried? 200 companies joined us.
Mark, I have admiration. Including major Indiana companies.

I have admiration, but could you do that today? Would you be worried? Absolutely. Of course.
Because you want to get government contracts. You want to continue to participate.
Of course. We didn't lose any government contracts on that.
I don't feel like there is a retribution for that. I have a great relationship in Indiana.
We have Indianapolis. I don't mean Indiana.
I mean, if CEOs in general are too loud, that they will be denied. California.
I think they should take my example and actually talk to people. I think that even the current governor in Indiana, Eric Holcomb, who I'm a huge fan of, I talk to him.
And I don't agree with everything. I don't agree with you on everything, Karen.
No, we don't agree on much, actually. I'm kidding.
I'm kidding. But we have a good dialogue.
Right, right. And we respect each other.
And also, I'm not afraid to talk to you about things. And this idea that we're watching a Super Bowl and that there's two teams and we're not able to cheer for either side, this is the end.
Like, we're all on the same team here, and this is the United States of America, and we should be fighting for America and our country and try to bring people together and have a great tech industry and a great economy and fight for our values. There are some issues when, for example, with California, Trump has threatened to defund cities.
He's threatened to keep away federal stuff. He's said it.
said it explicitly. And that is not, we're on the same team.
It's if you're not on our team, you're not on a team at all. And you're not getting, you know, a lot of transgender people are moving states worried about new laws.
So it's not exactly we're on the same team. It's be on our team or else in some cases.
I think we have to separate what is said during the campaign from what happens in an administration. And one of the things that I noticed in Trump One, I would call it, he has a huge Trump club in California, and he's here all the time playing golf.
And, you know, even there's a lot of pictures of him and Gavin Newsom together in Trump One, and they did a lot together, and they worked on a lot of projects together. So I understand when you're running, there's a huge amount of confrontation.
And then once you get into administration and you're the president, you're the president of the whole country. So, you know, that's when all of a sudden people tend to move a little bit more to the center, and I hope that's what happens.
We'll see, because, I mean, some of his appointments look crazy and some look very reasonable. That's what's happened.
That was true in Trump one also. Yeah.
Okay. So let me finish up on what's happening here with the federal government.
So you are – one of the things that's going to happen is this doge thing. A lot of it has to do with job cuts.
And you wrote a Time article – I'm surprised they published it – called How the Rise of Digital Workers Will Lead to an Unlimited Age. I want to know your position on the Department of Government Efficiency and the idea of cutting all these workers.
Because, you know, you're talking about AI agents that could make companies more profitable, government more efficient. You've talked of the post-labor economy, which is scary for people.
So talk about this push for efficiency with people worried. So how do you square that? Well, this is a moment in time that we have to get real about what's really happening with technology.
And that's why I wrote the article, because I think maybe it's the first article that was ever written about agentic or agents, as we're calling them, or agent force in time. And probably in a lot of places, this is the first time mainstream media has written about agents and what could happen.
I take that article very seriously. I think it's important that we do talk about what is going to potentially happen with digital labor and human labor and how they're going to work together and how there can be changes.
I think in a lot of government agencies, there probably is a lot of inefficiency. In my own company, there is a lot of inefficiency.
For the last two years, I've been trying to work on that. That's one of the reasons why we actually just had a great quarter.
You know, we not only had great revenues, but we had great margins and cash flow because we have to address where we have overlap, where we've overhired, or we've created too much bureaucracy. And your garden is not complete until you've taken everything out of it.
And that is true in managing an organization as well. And I think that we have to do that more in government.
I hope that there are practical things that we can do to make things happen. And I think in the case of where we want to maybe hire more people into the government, we're going to use recruiting agents.
And where we're going to, for example, help maybe provide more citizen access or direct interaction with the government with citizens, agents can be a huge opportunity for the government. Right, but address the worries.
And you can envision that yourself. Yes, absolutely.
But address the worries of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon have talked about, you know, $2 trillion in cuts. This is— Yeah, I put that on the cover of Time magazine.
You did. I think it's actually a good idea.
Yes. I think we must get back to a balanced budget.
I've been saying this for three decades. So this is not new.
This is not a political position. I believe that this should be a bipartisan position.
I have been appalled that our most recent presidents have not been trying to get to balanced budgets. I have had direct conversations with presidents in both parties that this is a critical part of our future.
We cannot be running these huge deficits. Everybody understands that.
So it's a question of deficit. Numbers are just, you know, unreasonable what's happening with the amount of interest that we're paying.
So if he can find a way to do that and we can rebalance our government, it's going to make for a much better economy overall. What in the short term happens to those people, though, in this shift? Whether it's a gigantic or just let's cut the fat out.
Some of it's not fat, it's just we're not going to do that anymore. Well, people will have to find new jobs.
And right now, unemployment is an incredibly low level. I can't even find people to hire myself.
So, you know, this is an idea that every organization must be constantly rebalancing and looking at its efficiency. And the government is not one of those organizations.
So they should adopt some of the best practices from America's best companies. That's one of the reasons we have great companies is because we do have practices and no one likes the word layoff.
The first time we did a major layoff, which was two years ago at Salesforce, I mean, people were so mad at me. Everyone's upset.
It's terrible. I hated doing it myself.
It was one of the darkest moments in my career that I even had to do it. But how else can I kind of got to where I am now, where I'm hiring thousands of people? So it was a moment where I had to restructure to get to where I would get to.
I could not get to where I am today without doing what I did then. I didn't like it.
I didn't want to do it. It was horrible.
I think we had conversations about it then. Yes, we did.
And you knew how upset I was. But now, look at how happy I am that I'm here.
And now, I just told everyone yesterday, I'm going to hire, you know, hopefully another 2,000 salespeople. The company is growing.
It's amazing. So, one of the people do say one of the reasons tech is so thriving is there's no very regulations hitting you the way it is other industries.
And I think probably you'd agree with that. There's not as many guardrails.
Talk about any regulations you think should happen. When Joe Rogan interviewed Marc Andreessen, you wrote that he unpacks the dangers of government overreach in crypto and AI.
Do you think the government's overreaching or do you see tech regulation as important? I couldn't tell because there haven't been many regulations. Well, I think in one area, you know that I feel that, what is that called? Is it Section 230? Yes, Section 230, yeah.
You know, I've said that should be. Social media.
That should be restructured. So that is an area that should be looked at and evaluated.
And restructured is not appropriate based on where technology is today. You called Facebook, I recall, in a famous interview with me, you called Facebook a cigarette company, I think, as I recall.
You may. I said that there are aspects of this technology, and I've been very clear about this, that can be addictive.
They can go after our kids. There needs to be oversight for our children.
And I have a lot of admiration for what Australia does. Yeah.
If you're under 16, you can't have a phone or social media or something. Not sure about phones.
They said, this stuff is too dangerous and addictive for kids.

I'm like, probably a smart idea.

And I think that we should be like thinking that way,

that we are dealing with explosive technologies,

that this is very serious.

A lot of this technology is amazing.

It's magical.

It's incredible.

It's going to transform our lives.

It is going to make us healthier.

It is going to make our climate better. It is going to educate us.
It is going to do all these incredible things. But wow, is it dangerous.
And we need to be really careful with it. So what AI regulation would you put in? What would you advocate for in AI, for example? Well, I think that I would be cautious in over-regulating AI right now because it's very nascent and I don't see a lot of danger.
That's what they said about Section 230, didn't they, Mark? Remember? I was around for that. Well, here's the difference, what I'm going to say.
And I think I just said it, and I think this is actually a good point. When they put in Section 230, that was a moment in time we can't just put something in and then never re-evaluate it.
You know, that was put putting decades ago. It wasn't put in last year.
Right. Over that period, three or four decades, technology has changed.
It has gotten dramatically lower cost, easier to use, and far more powerful. And you can't just put something in like that and then not reevaluate it on a regular and consistent basis if you're,-unquote regulating the tech industry.
And I think that that is where we are, that this stuff is moving fast. And that's why people like you are successful because you're able to report on all the changes.
And it's why people like me are successful because I'm able to build it and create it and sell it and market it, and it offers a lot of value to our customers.

But, you know, the government needs to adapt and evolve. So right now, no AI, but maybe change to 230.
Correct? Well, I would say that there should be kind of oversight and, you know, funding and research and evaluation, but we should be cautious with over-regulating. So speaking of actually doing things, you're not going to, there's a lot of people, Elon and Vivek are the new Doge masters, whatever that ends up meaning.
Many other tech people are infiltrating the government. Joe Lonsdale, your best friend, wants to be in it.
Emil Michael, who is the number two executive at Uber. Obviously, Peter Thiel has his connections.
Should there be this many tech dudes there? Do you think that's a good thing? Would you like to take a more active role? I've had my time in the

government. So no, you're not going to join it.
But who should? I think everybody should have

their chance. And, you know, that's when I was 40 years old.
I'm, you know, 60 years old now. I don't

know if this is exactly my moment to roll back into the government. We'll be back in a minute.
So I want to finish up. I have just a couple more questions.
You bought Time Magazine for $120 million, $190 million in 2018. There was reports that you were in talks to sell to Greek international media company Antenna Group.
Is this true that you're in conversations to sell it? Well, Time is a small company, and Time's amazing. I really enjoy Time.
I love it. I love working on it.
And look, Kara, if you're interested in buying it, we could have a conversation. But I don't have any deal on the table to sell Time.
Have you been in talks to do so, and why? There are always people who are approaching us to buy time. It is so well-regarded.
The brand, here's a funny story. I will go all over the world, because I have customers all over the world, and I'll be meeting with these customers.
I'll be meeting with media like yourself or others, and we'll be talking about things. And people that I don't know will say, hey, tell me, what do you do? And I say, I'm the CEO of Salesforce, and we're the second largest software company in the world.
And we have 75,000 people do $38 billion in revenue this year. And we're pioneering the Agentec platform.
It's very exciting. And I also own Time Magazine.
What? You own Time Magazine? Right. What does that mean? Right.
What does that mean, Mark? Tell me everything about what you're doing with Time Magazine. All right.
And I'm like, okay, well, this is a company of like 200 people and is, you know, has a physical magazine, a digital magazine. We do events.
We have a Time Studios. But small business.
We have a movie studio. Is there a way to make it anything but a small business in this day and age? It's a great business.
I think that was funny. We've been talking about the Trump administration.
I just read literally on the way to the interview that Jared Isaacman, who- It's going to be NASA head, yeah. I did a huge documentary on him called Inspiration 4, which is amazing on how he went to space and SpaceX and Elon.
And it's on Netflix. And if you haven't seen that documentary on Netflix, it is awesome, right? Right.
It's a time. And it's a great piece of journalism from time.
Right. And I would say things like that are super fun.
We also did Genius on Kanye West. It's like a six-hour documentary.
I think you're making fine things, but can it ever be a very good business? Well, I mean, it's fine, but Salesforce is a very good business. Right.
So is it a vanity project? How do you look at it? It's just fun and enjoyable, and it's more of a hobby, honestly. Look, it's a small business, and it's fun, and it's enjoyable.
That's why I've been doing it. And I wouldn't say I'm especially good at it.
I would say that I'm not great media owner, visionary media person. People will say that I'm a visionary.
I've won a lot of awards for being visionary and prophetic in the tech industry. Mark is a great visionary.
You've given me awards, all kinds of things, the leadership awards. You've handed me all kinds of pieces of glass with my name on it.
But I have gotten no awards. We're going to get to that.
We have two final questions about that. So every week we get a question from an outside expert.
Let's have a quick listen. And this is what you were just discussing.
Hello, Mark. Oliver Darcy from Status.
A few years ago, there was hope that billionaires like yourself would rescue the media. But recently, that notion has been punctured.
Jeff Bezos blocked the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris in the election, plunging the paper into turmoil. Patrick Student Xiong at the LA Times, who seems to be rather mega-curious, did the same thing.
Meanwhile, you're reportedly looking to sell Time Magazine after making cuts this year. Was the public wrong to put so much faith in wealthy men like yourself saving the fourth estate? Thoughts? Number one is not wealthy men because I own it with my wife.
Okay. Wealthy.
You're right. I know that that is something.
I didn't say it. I just want to call my wife.
I've texted you whenever you don't give women credit, but go ahead. Thank you.
The second piece is that media is hard. It's gone through a lot of transformation in the last 20 years.
Technology has changed media. And yeah, there are people in media like myself or Bezos who are working on these kind of established brands and media properties.
It's not easy. It's a lot of hard work.
But in the case of Time, I think the reason that we've been successful, and I do think we are successful, is we still have the magazine, which I love reading every week. And by the way, so does your good friend, Donald Trump.
If you go to Mar-a-Lago, they have huge walls of just Time Magazine coverage. It's amazing.
Yeah, that's your demographic, Mar-a-Lago people. But go ahead, go ahead.
Number two, we have phenomenal digital journalism. You can go to time.com and we even make our paywall free because we think free people should read freely.
We're very grateful to our sponsors who make that possible. And number three is we have physical events because we love bringing communities of people together, like our Time 100.
And you've been to some of those programs. They're awesome.
And also we do Time Studios to bring heroic work, like the work of Jared Isaacman or other creatives. Have you been good stewards as a group? I can't speak to Patrick and Jeff, which was just brought out, but I can speak to what we've done, I think has been really somewhat hard and difficult work, individuating it from Meredith, which was hard, creating its own independent company, building new products and product lines, and getting to the point where it's actually now a profitable business, that was really hard creative work.
We even went through all kinds of other product and creative iterations to get there and we're there. But wow, it's a journey.
It's not a great business. Whenever tech people say they're going to compete with me, I'm like, it's not a very good business.
Hey, did I mention Agent Force? This is really a great opportunity. Last two very quick questions.
When we talked about this acquisition in 2018, you told me, and I want you to listen to this back and forth. Go ahead.
It can be anything it wants to be. What's your role? You're not answering my question.
I'm inspiring, visionary. What does that mean? What, are you going to walk around and say things? Yeah, I'm going to walk around and try to inspire a vision for the future of the brand.
What does that mean? I don't even understand what that means. Well, that's why I am a visionary leader, Cara, and you're not.
But I actually make content. So I would like to know if you were the owner of something that I had, what your business was.
Well, here's how I look at it, which is I think we are going through a lot of change in our society today. And for a lot of people, they're not really sure how to make context of this change.
And is it going to really help them or is it going to hurt them? And I think that having a trusted guide like Time Magazine and having that in the right hands and giving the leaders of that magazine the support they need to do what they need to do, I think that's the most critical thing. And you've told me you're going to give them more money.
Oh, yeah. We're going to invest.
That's for sure, the last part. Yeah, I know.
It's a lot of your money. You still had to make layoffs, too, which are difficult, as you said.
We had to invest a lot to get it to the point where it is now. Yeah.
So, I think all those things were really true. I didn't realize, actually, I was as visionary as I am when I go back and look at the statement.
If you do say so yourself. I would say, yeah, well, you are a visionary in the media industry.
But, no, I think that that's very true, everything I said. Yeah.
Okay. All right.
So you're still the visionary. You still claim visionary status.
Kara, you are also very much a visionary. I am.
I know that for sure. So last question.
You and I have someone that we totally agree on, Susan Wojcicki, who tragically died this year. She was also on.
Oh, gosh. Now you're just going to make me cry.
That's the whole point of this interview? I'm going to make you cry. I want you, someone who knows her.
She was one of the good ones, and they're dwindling, let me just say. And Susan's death underscores that for me.
So I'd love you to take a moment and reflect on her impact. Well, I would just say that, and I'll do what I can.
I'm not prepared for this. I would say this was a great woman.
She is a great mother. She had incredible children.
She was a great wife. She has an incredible husband.
she is a great daughter her incredible mother

father who I both know

the father has also passed away a great sister she has two amazing sisters who i know very well just a great person in many ways a great role model to me a great leader in the tech industry helped google um this comes after all of those things you know she also led youtube through its incredible surge to be one of the dominant parts of our whole world she also was very much values based um she has done so much for her family and her friends including me she also joined my board at salesforce when i was going through some difficult times and led me through difficult times she was always there for me and i miss her every single day i have a huge photo of her in my main office which i look at every day, and I think about that all of our time is fleeting, that for all of us, life is precious, it's fleeting. We have the present moment, thank God, that we can be happy in and enjoy this moment and also realize that, take our life very seriously,, when I think about what am I doing with myself, my family, my friends, my health, my happiness, my career, my spirituality, my love of God.
All the things that are important to me, I take them all into my heart against the frame of Susan. You know, that I look at Susan as someone who in her life and in her death is a vision for me and an inspiration for my own life and has guided me.
And I have made changes in my life based on her life. Like, I really miss her.
And also I had another friend of mine that I lost this year, Sandy Robertson, who I miss also every single day. I think about these people, friends that I've lost.
I made a list of them now in my phone. And I look at that list and I think about who has left and what is the message that they left us with? And I think, you know, this is where we have to get back and really think about how much love do we have in our hearts for ourself and others?

Because when they leave, that's really all that is left.

Indeed.

Well said, Mark.

Keep that in mind.

Thank you, Kara.

You've got to make these guys not be so jerky.

Be kinder.

You have to.

I rely on you and Mark Cuban now. That's where I am, Mark.
That's right. You're the best.
I hope we have more conversations. All right, Mark, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. I love you, Cara Swisher.
You're the best. Oh, thank you, Mark.
On with Cara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.
Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Aaliyah Jackson, Rick Kwan, and Fernando Arruda.
And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are a visionary just like me and Mark.
If not, remember time is fleeting. So I don't know what to say.

Go wherever you listen to podcasts.

Search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast

Network and us.

We'll be back on Thursday with more.