Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff had himself a week. Days before the company’s annual Dreamforce Conference, an event that brings some 50,000 to San Francisco, Benioff gave an interview to a sympathetic reporter, the New York Time’s Heather Knight. The billionaire told Knight that he fully supports President Donald Trump, and said he would like to see the National Guard brought to San Francisco to combat crime in the city’s downtown.

Benioff is only the latest tech executive to offer his support for Trump. Some appear to be driven by self-interest; others, by ideology, preferring authoritarianism to the messiness of representative democracy. Regardless of their motivations, Trump has generously rewarded his new-found friends in the tech industry. Benioff’s friend and Trump donor, billionaire investor David Sacks, was tapped to be the new administration’s AI and Crypto Czar, an office expressly created to prevent regulation of these controversial technologies. Until their recent falling out, Tesla chief Elon Musk was given license to slash the budgets of various federal agencies as head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

Salesforce has been seeking a lucrative federal contract to supply AI technology to ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement. AI could help the Trump Administration nearly triple its workforce as it conducts immigration raids and deportations around the country.

The backlash was immediate. Elected officials, including recently elected Mayor Daniel Lurie, denounced Benioff’s call for federal troops. A press conference with Lurie and Benioff that had been planned to kick off the Dreamforce Conference was hastily scrapped by the image-conscious mayor.. Matt Dorsey, the most conservative member of the Board of Supervisors called Benioff’s comments “a slap in the face” to San Francisco.

Even fellow billionaires piled on. In a Wall Street Journal essay, Apple Computer Laurene Powell Jobs accused Benioff of using philanthropy to wield undue political influence in San Francisco. “In his eyes, generosity is an auction — and policy is the prize awarded to the highest bidder,” she wrote. (Benioff has donated millions to local public schools as well as a children’s hospital that bears his name.) Local tech investor and longtime friend Ron Conway abruptly resigned from the Salesforce Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm, saying he was “shocked and disappointed” by Benioff’s call for National Guard troops in San Francisco.

 A week after Benioff’s disastrous New York Times interview, he walked back his comments. “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he posted on X/Twitter. In the aftermath, Benioff continued to publicize his donations and his company’s donations to San Francisco institutions. 

Much of the harsh reaction appears to be the result of a misguided belief that Benioff was a “good” billionaire, one who wanted to do right by the city in which he was raised and now does business. It turns out that Powell Jobs has a more accurate assessment and the signs that indicated Benioff’s philanthropy was motivated by self-interest have been there all along.

Salesforce spent about $6 million to see Proposition C passed, a measure on the November 2018 ballot to tax local business to fund homeless services. Benioff, himself, donated $2 million on Prop C. It passed, but homelessness continued to grow steadily in San Francisco and across the state, the result of an increasing scarcity of affordable housing. While some lauded Benioff for his compassion, the Salesforce betrayed a far different sentiment in a New York Times interview just months before the November election. “There are some people in San Francisco who are intentionally homeless,” told a Times reporter. “They just want to be homeless. San Francisco is kind of the Four Seasons of homelessness. They all say this is the best place in the world to be homeless.”

By 2023, a frustrated Benioff was threatening to move Dreamforce out of San Francisco if the city failed to address its homelessness, calling it the city’s “no. 1 problem.” When pressed for a solution, he recommended more policing. Benioff applauded Mayor London Breed’s homeless sweeps timed to deliver clean streets before the conference. “We put a lot of pressure on the city this year,” he said. “When the city of San Francisco wants to look good and get shiny and clean and safe, it knows how to do it.”

The Benioff affair is another indication that Mayor Daniel Lurie’s strategy of recruiting local billionaires to tackle the city’s myriad challenges is misguided. Business executives expect a swift return on investment. Even a billionaire like the Salesforce chief, who left San Francisco for Hawaii years ago, expects to have a voice on how the city is governed.