“Hey, what’s going on?”
“It’s not interesting.”
“Very frightening”
This week, at a critical time for Salesforce, employees flooded the company’s Slack channels to criticize CEO Marc Benioff’s latest gaffe.
Instead of rallying staff around a shared vision for the company’s future, Benioff’s speech at a company-wide event on Tuesday caused an uproar within the company. It all started with a joke he made about ICE.
The controversy comes as Salesforce faces challenges that have caused its stock to drop 43% over the past year. Uncertainty about the company’s business model, demand for its AI services and increased competition has been causing investor anxiety for months. The company has seen a series of high-profile resignations of executives since December. Employees are currently in suspense over Mr. Benioff’s casual response to immigration crackdowns in the United States.
It’s been a rough week for Benioff.
“I can’t defend them or explain them.”
Benioff is known for telling off-the-cuff jokes. He joked that the 2023 layoffs ruined executives’ birthdays and that he was “thrilled” that the coronavirus pandemic allowed him to work from home.
His loose, unscripted style could work to Salesforce’s advantage. Benioff has used his charisma to create buzz and win patience from Wall Street during turbulent times.
However, there are times when you land poorly. Employees have described Benioff as “tone deaf.” In response to this week’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement joke, many people used harsher words like “horrible” and “despicable.”
Minutes into Tuesday’s keynote address, Mr. Benioff asked travelers from outside the United States to stand up, then suggested that ICE agents would be waiting in the back, according to employees who heard the comments. He also suggested that ICE agents were on hand for employees who don’t yet use Slackbot and complained about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Before McConaughey began speaking, a Slack channel for employees called Grievance Broadcasting, which had about 25,000 members, had been running for a long time and focused on topics such as employee cats, office lunches and how much the company was paying McConaughey.
The mood quickly darkened as employees began posting their reactions to the joke. Numerous comments filled the channel, many punctuated with multiple replies and emojis.
One of the many messages seen by Business Insider read, “All he had to do was give a corporate presentation. There’s only one job. Please don’t talk about your agent or something and make plutocratic billionaire jokes that show how out of touch you are from real life.”
“How can you talk about trust and equality right after making a joke about ICE?” said another.
Criticism was not limited to ordinary people. Rob Seaman, general manager of Slack, a Salesforce company, condemned Benioff’s comments.
“I cannot defend or explain them,” Seaman wrote in an internal message. “They don’t align with my personal values, and I know this is true for many people as well.”
Seaman continued, “I hope I can highlight something that was actually very positive from the morning, which is a real, genuine recognition of the work you’ve done and the importance of Slack right now.”
In a message, Salesforce Vice President Craig Broskow said the comments “cast a shadow” on the work of employees and called on Benioff to publicly acknowledge that his comments had upset “a large portion of our workforce.”
That didn’t happen. Benioff has not released any statements since the meeting. Excerpts of the recording of Benioff’s keynote speech, viewed by Business Insider, were posted on ICE’s internal website without Benioff’s comment. Salesforce did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Benioff’s comments.
Benioff has a history of standing up for employees on political issues. In 2015, he and his company led a boycott of Indiana businesses in response to religious freedom laws and arranged $50,000 relocation packages to help employees leave the state. Salesforce also proposed reassigning employees after Texas passed an anti-abortion law in 2021, which Benioff praised, although he said he didn’t come up with it.
“Bring back the energy of 2015,” one employee wrote on Slack on Tuesday.
Late last year, ahead of the company’s Dreamforce conference, Benioff expressed support for President Donald Trump and said he believed the National Guard should be deployed to San Francisco. After receiving abuse from some Bay Area politicians and residents, Benioff apologized.
Employees also resurfaced past statements by Mr. Benioff this week, including comments made after the high-profile killing of a Minneapolis resident by federal immigration agents.
“As we witnessed horrific acts of violence in Minnesota this weekend, I wanted to check in with you,” Benioff’s statement, which has not been reported, reads in part, according to a screenshot seen by Business Insider.
“After all, was this just lip service?” wrote one employee.
Read more Inside Business
Putting Agentforce under the microscope
Benioff is credited with popularizing the Software-as-a-Service model and building one of the world’s largest enterprise companies in the process. His free-spirited, evangelical style is helpful in that effort. These days, AI is both a threat and a potential opportunity for that model.
As Business Insider reported late last year, Salesforce’s strategy has centered around its Agentforce AI product, but some investors, analysts, customers and even employees say Mr. Benioff may have put too much into a bet that hasn’t yet paid off.
As of summer 2025, fewer than 2% of customers were having Agentforce conversations more than 50 times a week, according to people familiar with the internal report. A Salesforce spokesperson said at the time that these numbers are only a portion of the data and do not reflect actual adoption or usage of the tool. Last quarter, the company raised its full-year revenue forecast, which it said was also thanks to some progress with Agentforce.
Overall, the company’s stock price has fallen 43% over the past year as it weathered uncertainty around demand for its AI services, the industry’s high-stakes shift from traditional seat-based licensing to consumption-based pricing, increased competition from rivals like Microsoft and Oracle, and investor uncertainty about how AI companies’ tools like OpenAI will reshape the software landscape.
Five prominent leaders have left the company since December ahead of the new fiscal year on February 1st. This is a time when companies often change top management. Salesforce also laid off fewer than 1,000 employees during the same period. Salesforce has appointed new leaders to replace executives.
“Your absence has been confirmed.”
A day after Benioff’s ICE joke, he never formally acknowledged the situation. The programming started out as just a “bad” Blues Brothers parody and “made people on Slack cringe,” the employee said. “Not in a sinister way, just corporately bad,” one person pointed out.
After Mr. Benioff’s joke, employees immediately began discussing ways to organize a response, including canceling work for the day, leaving the office all at once or leaving the office, and supporting communities affected by ICE. Employees were also asked to sign a letter calling on Mr. Benioff to publicly denounce ICE, bar him from using ICE services, and support legislative efforts for civilian oversight. A copy of the letter obtained by Business Insider quotes Salesforce pitching ICE to use its AI technology and appears to have been drafted before Benioff made any comments about the company.
It’s unclear whether employees skipped work to protest, but some internal messages seen by Business Insider suggested they might. Some employees said they received emails from Salesforce reprimanding them for not participating in the program for Tuesday’s event following Mr. Benioff’s comments and asking them to explain why.
“Your absence was noted during today’s CKO program,” an excerpt of the email posted on Slack said, referring to the company kickoff. “During the scheduled sessions, participants did not participate in the sessions and were observed in hallways, bars, casinos, restaurants and other areas of the hotel premises. This does not meet our expectations.”
One employee wrote on Slack that the email included a short Google form for explaining “extenuating circumstances,” and responses were limited to 250 characters.
“No one should be penalized just because they don’t want to be in an environment where they or their co-workers feel psychologically or physically unsafe,” one employee wrote on Slack.
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