https://www.city-journal.org/homelessness-tech-industry
Tech mogul Marc Benioff has been winning media accolades for his declaration that “capitalism, as we know it, is dead.” The billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, a cloud-based customer-relations company, has launched an advertising blitz promoting his new book, Trailblazer, which calls for a “more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism,” as Benioff put it in a New York Times op-ed on Monday. This “new capitalism” would not “just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact,” Benioff maintains.
Benioff’s belief that providing products to willing consumers “takes” from society is apparently shared by the 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable, who rejected the traditional principle of corporate shareholder responsibility this August in favor of “stakeholder responsibility.” Benioff suggests that the Securities and Exchange Commission (or, as he put it in his Times op-ed, the Security and Exchange Commission) start requiring corporations to document how their actions affect this amorphous and infinitely expandable set of “stakeholders.”
Fortunately for anyone seeking to evaluate what the new capitalism might entail, Benioff has provided a concrete example of a CEO solving “social challenges”—the challenge in this case being San Francisco’s festering homeless problem. Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco and is the city’s biggest employer. In 2018, Benioff, in conjunction with San Francisco’s most fearsome advocacy group, the Coalition on Homelessness, put a new tax on the local ballot to double the taxpayer dollars already going to the city’s main homelessness agency. Proposition C would impose an extra 0.5 percent gross-receipts sales tax on companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue, raising an estimated $250 million to $300 million, all of which would be funneled into the homelessness-industrial complex.
