 Greetings to everyone tuning in around the world, I'm Rebecca Blumenstein with the New York Times and I'm very happy to be here with Mark Benioff, the CEO and Chairman of Salesforce for the past 22 years, which is quite an impressive run. Mark, Salesforce has played a key role in the pandemic. You've enabled remote work and business and you're also known as, in many ways, the original activist CEO, which has been a big topic around the World Economic Forum these days. I'd love to start with that, especially, you know, over the past week, given the controversy here in the United States about Georgia and the restrictive voting rules that were passed, it's kind of reignited what the role of companies should be. What is your stand on that legislation? Well, my stand, Rebecca, is, you know, that voting is the foundation of our democracy and everyone is entitled to their vote. And we should encourage and have everyone legally voting as often as possible in these elections so that our democracy can continue. I think that's extremely important. And so I'm in favor of the activism. I think it's important that these companies and these individuals realize that they have a voice and that companies do have a role in making a statement. And I'm all for what the Major League Baseball did. They made a clear statement that they don't support it. They gave it a thumbs down. And of course, Salesforce gave it the same thumbs down before the vote happened. Have you been involved in trying to convince other CEOs to take a more active stand, both in Georgia and in other, on other issues? Well, I think you know that I believe business is the greatest platform for change. I believe that CEOs really have an opportunity using their businesses to improve society. And that could be directly make it a commentary to politicians or building great products or making sure that their companies are net zero. I think in all of those cases, business are improving the state of the world. Do you think, I think at least in the US business community, there was a hope and a rich lesser who we both know the CEO of Boston Consulting Group was quoted in the Times this week saying that there have been some who thought that hope this would become easier after Trump. But in many ways, workforces, people are getting more activists, companies are being held to higher account and it's getting harder. How do you view this? I think a lot of people did think that post Trump that the role of business would become clearer. Well, I look at it more about the employees. And when I look at our own company and when we've had to take certain activist roles like we've done in Indiana, for example, many years ago now, it's really driven by the employees. People always say to me or like you mentioned, you know, our friend wrote a headline that Mark is the activist CEO. It's not me. It's really I'm just acting on behalf of my employees. They make a case and you know, I were one team where I'm not making a some unilateral decision. It's I'm trying to take their voice and their energy and channel it as as they want me to. And I think employees today are really the true activists. So you can see that in your newsroom. You can see it in your industry. You can see it in my industry where the employees have a voice and a role and say are able to say things and have action in ways that maybe previously they could not. And that's really where we are. And to that point, CEOs have a responsibility to listen to their employees and then act on their behalf. And I think in the case of Indiana, where there was laws being signed that constrained and started to discriminate against the LGBTQ community, you know, our employees said to me, Hey, Mark, you have a responsibility to go out there and use now the power of the company that collectively we have and have it changed. And of course, we negotiated with the governor and we have that law changed. We found a mutual resolution and you can see that in lots of places in the world in the United States, but also in other countries, that companies can have a role in shaping policy and expressing their pleasure or displeasure with certain policies. So are we getting closer to to what's known as stakeholder capitalism? I mean, many, many people have, have, have, you know, criticized that term slightly, just just kind of considering it, you know, PR in a sense, and it's not really taken hold. Do you do you see this leading to a meaningful change ultimately and in how capitalism works? Well, it came out of the World Economic Forum and the founder here, Klaus Schwab was currently the chairman of the World Economic Forum really conceptualized and evangelized this idea that companies must be about all stakeholders and also their shareholders. So that means their employees are important, their customers, their partners, their local communities, their public schools, that the environment is a key stakeholder, you know, can't have a successful business without a successful environment. And that CEOs, you know, can't just manage for shareholders, they have to have a bigger mindset and that that idea of stakeholder capitalism that you're, you know, you're really thinking about everything a lot more holistically, that is a winning idea. And it's not the idea that I had when I went to business school back in the 80s. You know, this is a relatively new idea. And it's an idea that has a lot more traction today than it's ever had. And when I talked to CEOs, they're able to operate for all stakeholders. And in some cases, they become exactly as you said, theoretical activist CEOs, but really they're just saying, hey, on behalf of all of our stakeholders, we think that this company needs to take this action or this action or this action. In the case of MLB baseball, you saw this week, they basically said, we're moving the game, because we don't think this supports all stakeholders. So this is a powerful motion in business. And I encourage it. And I think that everyone has to be a part of improving the state of the world, including companies, CEOs and their employees. So you think in a sense, all of these moves are part, part and parcel of a growing stakeholder capitalism movement. Well, one of the most exciting things that happened this year, Rebecca is the World Economic Forum's IBC, which is their International Business Committee, which is 200 of the top CEOs in the world basically decided that they were going to begin to be fully transparent in what is, I would say, 22 well established metrics or KPI is kind of key performance indicators in their companies that they have never published before. And of course, companies publish their revenue and profits and they're audited by these big four accounting firms, you know that and you look at those reports, but those reports don't include things like emissions or pay equality or community investment and a couple dozen other key KPIs. And these CEOs for the first time in business history have standardized on these 22 well established metrics. And now the four accounting firms have agreed to publish them and audit them. This is a big moment. But if you connect it back to what you were just talking about, what it means is that we're moving more towards stakeholder capitalism, because these things are really stakeholder issues, they're not just pure financial metrics, they are about all stakeholders. And that is very exciting. And that's a new moment in business. So, so today, Jeff Bezos made headlines here in the United States when he called for an increase in the in the corporate income tax to support President Biden's infrastructure plan. That's almost a classic, you know, you know, squaring off of the two interests here, like traditional shareholder interests would would not would not allow for supportive such a move. Do you do you also support an increase in the corporate tax rate? Well, I think you saw several years ago, Salesforce, advocated aggressively and helped get passed and even through the Supreme Court, a tax rate in San Francisco of a very small percentage of our revenue designed to support the homeless. The homelessness became a major issue in San Francisco. And so we advocated for Proposition C. And that has passed. And now that generates about $30 million a month in additional services for the homeless in San Francisco, we felt it was starting to impede our ability to be successful. So we advocated for an additional tax. I think of the case where businesses believe like you just said with Amazon, and I think Salesforce also believes this as well, that it's appropriate to have increased taxes that they should advocate for those taxes, and they should make the case why that is. And I think in the case of the United States, we probably do need revisions and have conversations about what our tax rates should be, but we also have to balance that against the United States's ability and need to be competitive in the world. So whatever that final tax rate is, it needs to be set in a competitive framework. So are you are you agreeing with Bezos on this or saying that you think that you that you would support a general, you know, a general push to look at this with fresh eyes? I'm I'm in favor of looking at it with a beginner's mind and saying let's look at the tax rates and let's let's find the correct number. And let's have a conversation and do it together. And so mostly I would say I'm in favor of what Jeff is saying. But at the same time, I'm also saying let's also do it in the framework of competitiveness and global competitiveness. So the environment is obviously something that you're very committed to as a leader and as a company. Salesforce is is already net zero and you've called on all other businesses to get to net zero. How realistic is that? I mean, it's a little easier for a cloud computing company than say General Motors or some heavily emitting industries. I think it's very realistic. I think that companies today, all companies have the ability to become net zero companies, I think all countries have the ability to be net zero countries. We just saw Prime Minister Sue Gower doing this under the auspices of Japan calling and saying that he was going to accelerate Japan's push to become a net zero country. I'm very grateful to him for doing that. I think climate change and the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is the number one issue in the world. Today, we need to do four things in regards that we need to reduce emissions, we need to sequester and get the 200 gigatons of carbon that we've put out into the environment since the first industrial revolution out of the environment, we need to educate people on how their behavior and their diets impact the amount of CO2 in the environment. And we need new innovations to achieve all of that and to hit these major goals. Personally, I'd like to see a broad effort to sequester 100 or 200 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere. It's one of the reasons why I found it two years ago at the World Economic Forum, 1T.org, which is the one trillion tree initiative. The idea that we're going to plant one trillion trees to sequester a couple hundred gigatons. And another reason why I'm so grateful that Canada just joined that effort. And so they're going to plant two billion trees because we know that whether it's reforestation or other key things that we can do in the environment, we can make major impacts on the amount of CO2 that we are currently moderating against. You were successful in getting President Trump to sign on to support this initiative, which many people felt at the time would be impossible to do. How important do you see your role as a CEO in terms of trying to make climate, you know, less of a partisan issue than it's become? Well, I think that climate is our number one issue. And I think when we look out at the next 20 years, like we just heard from that fabulous video, we have all these amazing new technologies. How can we use it to improve the situation in the climate? And when we look at the climate, we see that, you know, there's a need to change how we're interacting with the environment that we have to reduce the amount of CO2 that we're putting out there. So we have to look at basically four types of carbons, if you will. There's green carbon trees, like I just mentioned, this idea of planting one trillion trees, we used to have six trillion trees on the planet. Now we have three trillion trees, each trillion trees sequesters 200 gigatons of carbon. So as we reduced from six trillion trees to three trillion trees, we, you know, basically released 600 gigatons of carbon. That carbon basically gets either absorbed into the soils, they absorb about 3000 gigatons of carbon, or the oceans and the oceans sequester about 20,000 gigatons of carbon. That's why the oceans are getting hotter, because they're pulling more of that carbon down. So we need to look at how are we going to add more trees? How are we going to nurture the soils or maybe move to regenerative soils or no till farming to sequester more carbon? How we're going to create more environments in the ocean, whether it's through mangroves or seagrasses to sequester more CO2 in the ocean successfully, or new kinds of great carbon where we even have technology like the technology being built, for example, in Switzerland by Climorx to create great carbon, be able to actually remove it from the atmosphere and turn it into blocks of to be used for construction or buried in the ground. But that idea that there's four types of carbon, green, blue, brown, gray, that we need to put together a portfolio of that carbon, that's, you know, what I'm thinking about. And I've been inspired by a lot of companies who are using fourth industrial technology, like we just heard about maybe things like artificial intelligence, where we can see that they are able to like, have clarity on where the biodiversity is on the planet, and either how to conserve it, or how to mitigate it, or how to get corporations or, or even countries to say, okay, we're going to protect this because this is going to be our carbon bank. This is really a moment where we have the ability to do all of those things. So ahead of the climate talks this fall, I had the honor of interviewing Secretary Kerry soon after he started his role as the US climates are, you know, there was a broad consensus that business needs to do more. Aside from the WEF goals, would you support businesses committing to new pledges to become net zero or to more aggressively tackle climate change and many of them are now? Well, absolutely. And I think that the United States having a key administration official dedicated to the environment is an incredible first step. And that idea that businesses have to be part of the solution. I, of course, I'm going to fully agree with that. And I think that technology and next generation companies also have to be part of that solution. I've been very impressed, for example, with the work of a company called Sylvia Terra, who's taken AI and biometricians to really be able to look at maps generated by companies like Planet Labs to say, here is where the carbon can be stored or here is where biodiversity is that needs to be protected. And then for companies to come in and say, we're going to pay for that conservation or for that growth or for that enhanced biodiversity or for companies like Heliogen, who are kind of building next generation solar systems that are, you know, architected and managed by graphical processing units to create green hydrogen that there's these next generation capabilities that we can really harness to be able to deliver this climate solution that we're all looking for. I'd like to talk about the pandemic and how it's changed the world and the very nature of work. You know, Salesforce actually benefited to a certain extent by this sudden rush to, you know, to do so much work remotely. How much do you think work has changed for good? And you've announced some pretty aggressive plans yourself that that, you know, really a small fraction of your workforce is going to be coming back to the office for five days a week. Well, last year, I've been working it out of my home and that's where I am right now. And I've been trying to mix start to mix back in going to the office, which I've done a number of times. And I've even started to in person customer events. I was just in Singapore, and I was able to meet with customers and also have an event and present to them like I would normally do in my business. And last week at Washington DC, I actually was able to go to Washington DC and present to customers who was outdoors. Unfortunately, it was raining. But we had to do it outdoors to be safe. And but I did I was presenting to customers in the United States in a live event. For me, that was a milestone that we were kind of back getting back gradually. And you mentioned Secretary Kerry, I went and saw him at the State Department and I walked through the State Department but I realized when I was there, most people are still working from home, you know, that it's still very much a work from home environment. So that's actually a bit of a metaphor for me that we're all still very much at home, we're slowly gradually coming back, some people who are vaccinated can come back to work, people who are using testing environments aggressively, can have events, and can come back to work like I did last week. And we're gonna have to find our way into a new normal. Now, does that mean that I'm gonna get rid of my fancy camera and computer here that I have in my home and then I'm gonna only work in the office? No, it doesn't. I'm going to continue to take the skills here that I've learned how to use in this environment and continue to use them in the future. And I will mix that with my physical environments, whether it's in person events or in person meetings in my offices around the world that I'll bring it all together as one integrated working strategy that I'll that I'll do both. And I didn't have these skills before I didn't even have this nice camera that I have plugged into my computer and, you know, there's nobody here in the studio helping me I'm all by myself doing this just like you are. And this is a skill that I have I'm planning to use this call you know work from home skill. And that's also why Salesforce has entered into an agreement to buy slack because we believe that all of our products have to become work from home first. And so that will be a major strategic motion we also build a product called Salesforce anywhere so that our customers can be successful from anywhere and sell from anywhere service from anywhere market from anywhere conduct commerce from anywhere collaborate from anywhere. And so we're in a new world and Salesforce is going to be a leader in that world I want to pioneer these new models myself and I'm very excited about getting back into the new into the new world and out of the out of the pandemic. So my colleague Kevin Ruse has written a book about the the push to automation which many feel has accelerated you know we're we've literally been an environment where companies are rethinking human contact. And and as we use AI more and and and really get this downstream into into business do you worry about the the impact on workers who could be displaced as a result of this some say that that basically years of work has been accelerated by the pandemic toward automation. Well I think that we know that you know we have new types of software new types of hardware new types of robotic and there's going to be you know growth in automation and growth in you know certain types of jobs that are going to be automated. At the same time there's growth in new jobs and new capabilities. It's one of the reasons that Salesforce created a service called trailhead.com to help reskill millions of workers into new types of digital high value jobs because we know that workers need to move from maybe what jobs were to what jobs need to be. And of course that's constantly happening through history technology is moving forward it's constantly getting lower cost it's constantly getting easier to use. But workers need to be reskilled and we can use technology to reskill workers and enter them into this new world. So as the US for example reopens and we see jobs come back and unemployment figures turn into employment figures. There's going to be some jobs that are not coming back. In those cases those workers need to be reskilled and and really guided and helped into new positions and that's a role that Salesforce wants to play and be very important part of. Also during the pandemic we've seen the tech companies your company and many of the other giants get even bigger and more powerful. You've come out pretty strongly in favor of more stringent regulation of tech especially the social media platforms. You famously compared Facebook to to smoking the news to being the new cigarette what is your view of of the best way to do this and do you think it's going to happen quickly. Well technology has moved so quickly I don't think everyone realizes the power of artificial intelligence of the power of this information. Technology maybe they saw for the first time this year in social media the impact of this technology or bought so even on an election but it's happening every day in every facet of our life whether we realize it's happening or not. And there are certain moments where the government needs to come in and revise and enhance regulations that no longer apply or you still apply and now no longer apply and that's something that I've been advocating now for several years exactly like you mentioned that the government needs to become more active and more aggressive in the regulation of these companies and what is happening and I think it's happened a little too slowly for my taste and I think that society as in some parts of society specifically have been damaged because governments have not moved quickly enough and there's been not enough regulation and new regulation written to kind of support the new world that we're in today. Do you think Facebook and Google are doing enough to combat disinformation they say they're trying but you know does it take you know them being subject to article 230 some real changes in the law to make them actually legally liable? Well I certainly called for that law to be looked at and enhanced or changed or for it for that whole section of law to evolve that's been important to me I also believe that while those companies have made some changes and enhance some of their policies which I think is more than appropriate I don't think that any of them have gone far enough and I think there's plenty of examples where they just have not been aggressive we're pulling those companies into the future they should be pulling us and they should be not protecting their old revenue models but instead they need to be aggressively going after how they're going to protect us as their users as society that should be their primary point of view that's true stakeholder capitalism not just focusing on your shareholder but focusing on all of your stakeholders and one of your key stakeholders is society and even your users and the structure you know that you're existing in so only focusing on your business model which is I think how a lot of those companies have been behaving was completely inappropriate and they need to pivot to supporting all of their stakeholders and protecting us and as an example some of them now have products like you mentioned Facebook's just for children and these technologies targeted and pointed towards children well that's where I think things have to cross the line you say that has to stop and that's why I'm such a supporter of the work and policies have been advocated by common sense media because they have really said hey when you're going after children you need to protect them and not turn them into your product but that is what is happening at Facebook so our time is quickly passing I have two last quick questions probably but your own future Jeff Bezos has given up the CEO title some have said that you have a worthy successor in Brett Taylor do you have any plans to make a change to your own status anytime soon well I mean Rebecca I every year that I've been the CEO of Salesforce I get that question you know that's what common interview question for a CEO and all I can tell you is I'm here and very excited I've never been more excited about the future of Salesforce it's been an amazing 22 years of Salesforce and I think the next 22 years for Salesforce will be even more amazing finally you brought time magazine I thought you were going to say that but you bought time magazine which is in the process of issuing NFTs and doing some business in Bitcoin you've become a you know a believer in those technologies I assume well I think you have to look at Bitcoin and NFTs and cryptocurrencies as an exciting part of the future it's really incredible technology at Salesforce we've been using them for years we've built those blockchain technologies deeply into our platform we've helped customers provide everything from transparent food networks so that consumers can see exactly how their food was delivered to helping sneaker companies automate their supply chains and making sure that they're not zero all using the blockchain you know now I think when you look at the next generation of blockchain killer apps of course Bitcoin is a killer app for the blockchain another killer app for the blockchain is NFT well for media companies it's an exciting monetization capability for their digital assets and for time magazine you can see how they have now been able to turn quite a few of their covers into NFTs and I'm confident that there'll be a number of other amazing cover opportunities coming for collectors of time magazine in the future and it's exciting to work with those collectors to offer them products like the NFT versions of Salesforce time covers so that they can add those to their collections maybe we should add to some Salesforce covers in there too Mark thank you so much for a fast New York Times covers too Rebecca so thank you we appreciate that thank you take care