Marc Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff born September 25, 1964 is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. Benioff is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, ( CRM ) as well as being the owner of the magazine Time since 2018.

While in high school, Benioff sold his first application, How to Juggle, for $75. In 1979, when he was 15, Benioff founded Liberty Software, creating and selling games such as Flapper and King Arthur's Heir for the Atari 8-bit. Royalties from these games helped Benioff pay for college.

While at USC, Benioff had an internship as a programmer at Apple. He joined Oracle Corporation in a customer-service role after graduating. Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in a variety of sales, marketing, and product development roles. At 23, he was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year. Three years later, he became the youngest person in the company's history to earn the title of vice president.

Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999 in a San Francisco apartment and defined its mission in a marketing statement as "The End of Software." This was a slogan he used frequently to preach about software on the Web, and used as a guerilla marketing tactic against the dominant CD-ROM CRM competitor Siebel at the time. Salesforce was the first company to offer software as a service, which allowed people and companies to rent software over the internet instead of installing the programs on machines. Benioff extended Salesforce's offerings in the early 2000s with the idea of a platform that allowed developers to create applications.

Benioff also serves on the World Economic Forum's Board of Trustees and USC Board of Trustees.

On September 16, 2018, Marc and his wife Lynne bought Time for $190 million