The rise of Marc Benioff, the bombastic Salesforce CEO who's buying up Time Magazine for $190 million (CRM)

By: Business Insider

September 17, 2018 at 13:46 PM EDT

AP Photo/Ben Margot

It seems like Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff never leaves the spotlight.

Between Salesforce's upcoming Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco, his philanthropy, and his willingness to take political stands, it seems like he's always in the spotlight — even if, sometimes, it's because he's facing protests over Salesforce's work with the United States Customs and Border Patrol.

Now, Benioff is taking center stage once again, amid a surprise announcement on Sunday that he and his wife, Lynne Benioff, intend to buy up Time Magazine for $190 million. The move makes the tech CEO a media mogul, too, much like how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post. And just as with Bezos, it could make Benioff a target in President Donald Trump's ongoing war on the news media.

Salesforce itself is in a good position at the moment: Under Benioff's leadership, the company has swelled to a $106 billion market cap, even as it hit $10 billion in annual revenue for the 2018 fiscal year. It's gone from an upstart Oracle rival to a cloud computing behemoth in its own right. Earlier this summer, Salesforce named former Oracle exec Keith Block as Benioff's co-CEO, giving Benioff some backup in the highest echelons of the company.

Here's how Benioff, with an estimated net worth of $6.3 billion, worked his way up to the national stage from humble origins.

Marc Russell Benioff was born in San Francisco on September 25th, 1964, the son of Joelle and Russell Benioff. Benioff is something of an anomaly among Silicon Valley CEOs — he was actually born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

His father, Russell Benioff, owned a local department store in San Francisco. "I learned my work ethic from him," Benioff once said.Business Insider

While in high school, Benioff sold his first app — software called "How To Juggle" for the TRS-80 Model 1 computer — to a computer magazine for $75.Gabriel Rojas Hruska/flickr

At age 15, Benioff founded Liberty Software, his one-man company making games for the Atari 800 computer. Titles included "King Arthur's Heir," "The Nightmare," "Escape from Vulcan's Isle," and "Crypt of the Undead."Matt Weinberger

By age 16, Benioff was pulling in $1,500 a month — enough that after he graduated high school in 1982, he was able to pay for his own tuition at the University of Southern California.Wikimedia Commons / Bobak Ha'Eri

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