Benioff is the founder, chairman and co-chief executive officer of Salesforce, a provider of customer services software. The San Francisco-based company provides cloud-based software for the management of sales, marketing and analytics. Salesforce reported revenue of $26.5 billion in the year to Jan. 31, 2022.
The majority of Benioff's fortune is derived from his stake in Salesforce, a provider of software for sales, customer service and analytics. He owns owns about 3% of the company, according to an October 2023 regulatory filing.
The billionaire has collected more than $2 billion from the sale of Salesforce shares, based on an analysis of company filings and Bloomberg data.
The value of his cash investments is based on these proceeds, as well as market performance, taxes, charitable contributions and asset purchases.
A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment on Benioff's net worth.
Marc Benioff was born in 1964. A fourth generation San Franciscan, Benioff graduated from Burlingame High School in the Bay Area in 1982. While still in high school, he founded Liberty Software to create and sell videogames.
After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1986, Benioff began working at Oracle. He stayed there for 13 years and held several positions in sales, marketing, and product development. He was the top Oracle salesperson for new accounts at age 23, according to a 2012 Fortune article.
Benioff left Oracle in 1999 to co-found Salesforce with software developers Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. They created an on-demand information management service to replace traditional software. The company had its IPO in June 2004, raising $110 million.
In 2012, Salesforce purchased online marketing firm Buddy Media and Canadian startup GoInstant. It acquired email marketing company ExactTarget the following year and bought Demandware in 2016 and Mulesoft in 2018.
Outside of Salesforce, Benioff and his wife Lynne are involved in several philanthropic efforts. They have donated $250 million to the University of California San Francisco and the Oakland Children's Hospital, now renamed Benioff Children's Hospital. Through the Salesforce.org foundation, he created the 1-1-1 model, where a company commits 1 percent of its employee hours, 1 percent of its equity, and 1 percent of its product to philanthropy.