Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Mark, thank you as always for joining us. You are at a big groundbreaking ceremony today at Strab Benioff Medical Center in Honolulu. This is just one of many hospitals that you've now contributed to in Hawaii. And if I got my math right, this gift means you have given now four hundred and fifty million dollars to healthcare in both Hawaii and San Francisco. Talk to us about the
thrust of these hospital gifts. What are you really trying to achieve here and how does it fit into your broader philosophy.
Well, I'm so grateful to be here with you today, Emily, and it's wonderful to be here in Oahu. I think this is your home town. Is that right?
It is? Yes, indeed it is.
And I'll tell you we're doing something exciting here. We're breaking ground at a new hospital, which is the Straw Benioff Hospital here, and we just broke ground two weeks ago at the new Helo Medical Center. And I'll tell you it's great to be doing philanthropy and Hawaii. We've done it for so many years in the Bay Area, as you know, We've built two amazing children's hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, and now we're bringing that great
expertise here to Hawaii as well. It's really an incredible trinity that we've created between Heilo Oahu and also UCSF and bringing it together. Well, this is going to improve the health of the Hawaiians. That's what we're all about.
Talk to us about the connection between the hospitals in Hawaii and San Francisco, because I understand now there's an ability to share care and share information, you know, and improve the quality of care that folks get in Hawaii.
Well, Emily, as you know very well as a native Hawaiian, that when you're here in Hawaii, especially if you're in a neighbor island, you're living in paradise, but you also realize you might have made a trade that you may not have the same level of healthcare as you might have, for example, where you are right now in San Francisco. Well, you know, we want the best of both worlds. We want the idea that you can have great healthcare here
in Hawaii and also live in paradise. And the way that we're doing that is not only creating state of the art medical facilities and recruiting world class physicians here to Hawaii, but linking UCSF and also these Hawaiian hospitals together, and that's absolutely critical because look, we're going to be able to do great things here, but there will be limits, of course to what we can do in Hawaii, which is why the integration with UCSF, which is of course
the University of California, San Francisco, probably the premier medical center in the United States, is now part of Hawaiian Healthcare.
You've talked for many years about the requirement really responsibility to give back when you can, and you've talked a lot about folks not giving enough in the San Francisco community. You know, in Hawaii, you've made a number of property purchases, have a number of tech billionaires like Larry Ellison who now owns almost all of Leni, and Mark Zuckerberg on Kawhi and Jeff Bezos on Maui. Are all of those people giving enough, doing enough to give back to their communities.
Well, different people who live here like to do different things. Some people told me that I like to buy a lot of land here. That's preposterous. I have not done that I don't own hundreds of acres. I did buy hundreds of acres for an affordable housing agency in Heilo, So that is some land that went to help Hawaiians get homes. But I'm very happy just having my own personal residence here. But what I really enjoy is giving back.
And I think you know that in the Bay Area, not just through Salesforce that's given back hundreds of millions of dollars in the Bay Area, including being the largest provider to the local San Francisco Oakland public schools, but also to the hospitals. And this is so important to so we can give to our local public hospitals, our local public schools, even our local public parks. I think all of us can do so much more to give back. And you know, it's probably the most fun I've had
as the CEO of Salesforce. I mean, it's been an amazing journey becoming the third largest software company in the world. I think, you know we're going to you know, we said we're going to do about thirty eight billion dollars in revenue this year. Well that's been an amazing journey. But the fun part has been giving back and that's why I continue to do it and why we're going to continue to do a lot more of it in the future as well.
Well. Since you mentioned it, and you've now been back quote unquote as sole CEO of Salesforce for the last eighteen months, weathered activist investors, you know, talk to us a little bit about the learnings in terms of taking the rains, retaking the reins in the age of AI.
I think I might be one of the few CEOs that actually really enjoyed working with these activist investors. I had never heard so many great new ideas in my career,
including such out of the box thinking. And look, we were able to really transform and evolve Salesforce over the last year, and you can see it with our incredible financial results that we had last year and our idea that we're able to continue to move forward with these incredible new characteristics of our company and our last earnings result. We've even talked about that we've started to create a dividend that's something that was beyond my imagination even just
a few years ago. So it's exciting to be the number one CRM to help companies connect with our customers in a whole new way. Right now, we're about to enter an incredible new world, which is the world of artificial intelligence and how it's going to transform these customer relationships. And I think we're about to see some technology that we never thought we'd see in our lifetimes. We're going to see just some incredible new ways to run our businesses.
Competition and CRM is fierce. Mark You've got Service now trying to poach a bunch of Salesforce employees. They stopped using Slack after you bought it. They're trying to build more of a consumer brand. They started their own trailblazer program. Are they trying to pick a fight with you?
Well, they're an interesting company, you know. I just think they need to be careful. They might be getting a little ahead of their skis. We just replaced them at Disney. Of course, we already had run Disney stores and Disney Guides in the Park, and we had done a lot
of things with Disney with their customer relationships. But I think everybody knows that when they went to have Disney Plus and wanted to have a call center and they chose that company, well, unfortunately, Salesforce had to come in and rescue the entire operation and rebuild all of the customer success and call centers for Disney, and which was at that point had been called out as a marquee
customer of their as well. Salesforce is actually a tremendous company that does real customer success and delivers solutions in sales service marketing for so many great companies around the world. Now, you know, obviously standardized the Disney, but for so many other great organizations, banks, insurance companies all over the world. And I think we're doing pretty well on our own.
Alphabet and Hobspot. Google and Hobspots are in talks to merge. How significantly would that disrupt the CRM market?
Well, I don't I haven't really heard too much about that. Obviously, these are both great companies and customers of ours, and so we work with them very closely, and it'd be very interesting to see what would happen. But I really can't understand it because I actually have only heard the rumors that you've heard.
It's Bloomberg reporting. But we'll leave it there. Last question, I'd like love to ask you about TikTok if I may, because you've been such a vocal critic of social media and it's impact on children, it's impact on people. I'm curious what you think of the TikTok divestment law and if Salesforce would be at all interested in joining a coalition of companies interested in buying TikTok.
Well, we're not really a consumer company. We drive a lot of these consumer companies, so many of them are our customers. I know that, you know that's been an amazing journey. But I think that when it comes to social media, and I've said this before, we have to look very seriously at how it's being managed and how it's being regulated. There's certain US regulations that kind of give these social media companies a free ride even if their platforms are misused. I think that needs to be
directly addressed. I've talked about that, I think with you several times. And look, this is a serious world. And you talked about AI. AI is going to be able to create a lot of misinformation, and if we don't have a good understanding of how that's being used with social media, we could end up in this place that we don't want to be. You know, I'm a huge proponent of free speech, but I am not a huge
proponent of all speech. You know, I don't think that the ideas that hate speech or misinformation should really not be tolerated in some of these platforms. It's not trust, it's not tolerated at Bloomberg, it's not tolerated at Time or other media organizations. It shouldn't be tolerated on these social media networks as well.
All right, Mark Benioff in Honolulu, I'll let you get back to that groundbreaking ceremony. The CEO of Salesforce Mark, as always, thank you so much for joining us,