President Donald Trump posted on social media Thursday that he would not send the National Guard to San Francisco — reversing course after he spoke with friends in the area and the city’s mayor.
The president referenced billionaire Marc Benioff in his social media post. Benioff, the CEO of the tech company Salesforce, has a home on Hawaiʻi Island. He has been in the news lately, as he had previously told The New York Times he supported sending troops to San Francisco. Benioff later apologized.
Since the pandemic, the Salesforce CEO has purchased land and increased his philanthropy in the islands. He also switched his voting records from California to Hawaiʻi.
Emily Shugerman is a wealth and power reporter at The San Francisco Standard, an online media organization based in the Bay Area. She spoke with The Conversation about how Benioff has been pulling back from the city by the bay and focusing his attention on Hawaiʻi.
Interview highlights
On learning about Benioff's shift away from San Francisco
EMILY SHUGERMAN: Marc Benioff has a big fixture in San Francisco, not only as one of the co-founders of Salesforce, which is the largest private employer here, but also just as a philanthropist who's donated hundreds of millions of dollars to San Francisco and been very active in our politics here. And one thing that kept coming up in conversations that I was having with folks here is the feeling that Benioff was not as involved as he used to be. And in fact, the phrase people would use is 'Marc Benioff doesn't live here anymore.' And I thought, well, that is really interesting. If this man who was a champion of San Francisco for so long, loved to talk about being a fourth-generation San Franciscan, if he doesn't live here anymore, that would be something that might be interesting to the people who do live here. And so then that turned into weeks of me calling around, talking to folks in philanthropy, nonprofits in politics, asking, 'What have you seen of Mark Benioff lately? And where do you think he lives?' And that's how we got to the story.
On Benioff's involvement in Hawaiʻi
SHUGERMAN: I think he texted us saying that it is "no secret that I live in Hawaiʻi," but he also said he spends 75% of his time on the road doing his job. So how can he really be said to live anywhere or not live anywhere? And so we did our best to show that he really has established a home base in Hawaiʻi, first showing that he did change his voter registration from California to Hawaiʻi in 2021. He also noted, and we had picked up on this, that he seemed to have really transitioned his life there more post-pandemic. And he said to us that he had wanted to live in a more low-COVID area where things were more open. Other things we noticed was his growing involvement with Gov. Josh Green. He confirmed that the two of them text. They talk not infrequently. He's also been very involved philanthropically on the island, giving very large donations, over $100 million to hospitals, also donating to school districts and other philanthropic causes there, and also just spending an increasing amount of time there. As NPR reported back in 2024, he did make a lot of land purchases on the island. The bulk of those were donated to an affordable housing nonprofit. But he has definitely increased just the amount of land that he owns on the island as well.
On Benioff's influence in local politics
SHUGERMAN: We have seen a shift in recent years. He went from being seen as a liberal CEO, as someone who offered to relocate his employees out of Texas when they passed restrictive abortion law, who advocated for higher taxes on companies in order to pay for homelessness services, to someone who's now telling The New York Times that he thinks Trump has done a great job and that the National Guard should be sent into San Francisco. That's a pretty market change in priorities or values, and so I think it's really difficult to predict what he'll put his energy into next. … I think it would be very interesting to follow his donations going forward. He has become such a massive philanthropic presence on the island and told me that he was the biggest philanthropist in Hawaiʻi. I'm not sure if that's true. I haven't actually fact-checked that — we were focusing more on the San Francisco angle of it, but he is clearly someone that politicians there want to court, even if they're not getting donations from him, and it seems like he is exercising a lot of power through philanthropic donations. And I think that's something anyone interested there should keep their eyes on.
This story aired on The Conversation on Oct. 23, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
