Emerson Collective President and founder Laurene Powell Jobs, whose organization owns a majority stake in the Atlantic and has dolled out millions since its founding in 2011, blasted Salesforce CEO and Time magazine owner Marc Benioff over his support for Donald Trump’s potential deployment of the National Guard in San Francisco, writing that Benioff viewed charity as “an auction—and policy is the prize awarded to the highest bidder.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Friday, Powell Jobs pointed to Benioff’s comments in the New York Times that claimed such a federal intervention would “save” San Francisco and how he didn’t think “anyone has hired more people or given more money or supported San Francisco more than I have.” Benioff’s family and company have given more than $1 billion to causes in the San Francisco area over the last 26 years, according to the Times.
“The message beneath that comment was unmistakable: In his eyes, generosity is an auction—and policy is the prize awarded to the highest bidder,” she wrote. “But giving that expects control is anything but generous.”
Salesforce did not return a request for comment, but Benioff later on Friday posted on X that he no longer believed the National Guard was needed after Salesforce completed Dreamforce, his company’s AI-focused conference.
“My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused,” he said. “It’s my firm belief that our city makes the most progress when we all work together in a spirit of partnership. I remain deeply grateful to Mayor Lurie, SFPD, and all our partners, and am fully committed to a safer, stronger San Francisco.”
Emerson Collective makes its charitable giving anonymously, saying its grants are “in keeping with our view of the proper spirit of giving and to honor the work of our grantees.”
Powell Jobs said such a dynamic turns philanthropy into “performance art,” a “proof of virtue, a way to appear magnanimous while still demanding ownership.” It forces causes in need of funds to frame their issues around a donor’s interests, she said, instead of serving the communities they cater to.
“That’s the quiet corruption corroding modern philanthropy: the ability to give as a license to impose one’s will,” she wrote. “It’s a kind of moral laundering, where so-called benevolence masks self-interest.”
She framed the issue around the philosopher Maimonides’ belief that the purpose of philanthropy was to make the act of charity itself unnecessary. Upholding that, she said, required establishing relationships with those in need of donations and trusting that those receiving the funds were in the best position to understand and address a problem.
“The work of philanthropy, then, isn’t to command or correct—and it certainly isn’t to demean and disparage,” she wrote. “It’s to sustain. And its truest measure is not what it buys but what it actually helps to build.”
