Marc Benioff — ceo (salesforce) with roots in the Russian Empire
Marc Russell Benioff was born in San Francisco on 25 September 1964 into a Jewish family and grew up in Hillsborough, California. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his great-grandfather, Isaac Jacob Benioff.
Isaac Benioff was a furrier. A local historian of Jewish settlement in Delaware, working from census records, places his birth in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire, and assumes a birth year of about 1840; his children Benjamin, George Henry and David were born in Russia, and his second wife, Anne, was born in Rostov. According to the 1900 census, the family came to the United States in 1886. They lived first in Cleveland, where their first American-born child was born, then in New York, where Isaac opened a fur shop in Manhattan, and from 1897 on a farm at Viola, Delaware. His sons went into the fur trade, and in 1912 one of them opened Benioff's Furs in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Marc Benioff has spoken of Isaac publicly as a refugee who was warmly received in the United States, and has noted that the novelist and Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff is his cousin through the same great-grandfather.
At fifteen Marc founded Liberty Software and sold his first program, How to Juggle, for $75, and his games for Atari computers helped pay for college. He graduated from Burlingame High School in 1982 and from the University of Southern California in business administration in 1986, having interned at Apple. He then spent thirteen years at Oracle under Larry Ellison, where he was named rookie of the year at twenty-three and became one of its youngest vice presidents.
In 1999 he founded Salesforce in a San Francisco apartment, selling customer-relationship software over the internet as a subscription service, an early model of what came to be called software as a service. The company went public in 2004, joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020 and became one of the largest employers in San Francisco, where it is the anchor tenant of Salesforce Tower. He built a 1-1-1 model of corporate giving into the company and in 2014 co-founded Pledge 1% to extend it to others.
On 16 September 2018 he and his wife Lynne bought Time magazine for $190 million. He was named CNN Business CEO of 2020 and in 2022 received the Légion d'honneur.
"His great-grandfather Isaac Jacob Benioff, a furrier said to have been born in Kiev, came to the United States with his family in 1886 and settled in Cleveland, New York and later Delaware."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kiev (great-grandfather Isaac Jacob Benioff) (now Kyiv, Ukraine)
His great-grandfather Isaac Jacob Benioff, a furrier recorded as born in Kiev in the Russian Empire, emigrated with his family to the United States in 1886. Marc Benioff has spoken of him publicly as a refugee who was warmly received in America, and as the shared great-grandfather of his cousin, the writer David Benioff.
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Kiev (great-grandfather Isaac Jacob Benioff) (now Kyiv, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The business of business is improving the state of the world."