Salesforce Founder & Co-CEO Marc Benioff making a television appearance this month | Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
The first billionaire I ever interviewed was Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. It was the summer of 2011, and I was working on a profile of his surging interest in philanthropy, which had vaulted him into the uppermost ranks of the city’s donors. Benioff declined to talk to me at first, but eventually he relented, and he had me over to his very nice house in San Francisco to talk about his journey from workaholic salesman at Oracle to public company CEO.
One thing I took away from the conversation was that Benioff, much more than the other CEOs I had spoken with up to that point, framed every discussion in terms of values. It was why, he said, he had set aside 1 percent of his company’s shares to fund a philanthropic foundation,…