Inside the outrage over Marc Benioff's ICE jokes at a pivotal time for Salesforce

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made jokes about ICE during an employee event.
• Scores of employees, even executives, have expressed concerns about Benioff's comments.
• This comes as Salesforce faces challenges, with its stock falling 43% over the past year.

"Dude. What."

"NOT FUNNY."

"Deeply horrifying"

At a perilous time for Salesforce, employees flooded an internal Slack channel this week to denounce CEO Marc Benioff's latest gaffe.

Instead of rallying staff around a shared vision for the company's future, Benioff's speech during a companywide event on Tuesday sparked internal uproar. The trigger: jokes he made about ICE.

The controversy comes at a time when Salesforce is confronting challenges that have caused its stock to fall 43% in the past year. For months, uncertainty about its business model, demand for its AI services, and intensifying competition have sparked investor fears. Since December, the company has seen a string of high-profile executive departures. Now, Benioff's lighthearted treatment of the immigration crackdown in America has employees on edge.

It's been a rough week, in a rough year for Benioff.

'I cannot defend or explain them'

Benioff is known for making off-the-cuff jokes. He joked about 2023 layoffs ruining an executive's birthday and about being "thrilled" that the coronavirus pandemic let him work from home.

Sometimes, his loose, unscripted style works to Salesforce's advantage. Benioff has used his charisma to generate buzz and win patience from Wall Street during turbulent stretches.

However, it can also land badly. Employees have described Benioff as "tone deaf." Following this week's Immigration and Customs Enforcement jokes, many used harsher words like "horrific" and "vile."

Minutes into his keynote on Tuesday, Benioff asked people who had traveled from outside the US to stand up, then suggested ICE agents were waiting for them in the back, employees who heard the comments said. He also suggested ICE agents were around for employees who had yet to use Slackbot, and complained about Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show.

Before he started talking, a long-running employee Slack channel called "airing of grievances," with nearly 25,000 members, focused on topics like an employee's cat, office lunch, and how much the company is paying Matthew McConaughey.

The mood instantly darkened as workers began posting their reactions to the jokes. Scores of comments filled the channel, many of them punctuated by multiple replies and emojis.

"All he had to do was do a corporate presentation. One job. Just tell us about agents or something and don't make a plutocratic billionaire joke showing how distant you are from real life," read one of the many messages viewed by Business Insider.

"How can you talk about trust and equality right after making jokes about ICE," another said.

The criticism wasn't limited to the rank and file. Rob Seaman, general manager of Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, condemned Benioff's comments.

"I cannot defend or explain them," Seaman wrote in an internal message. "They do not align with my personal values and I know this to be the case for many of you as well."

Seaman went on to say: "I hope we can highlight what was actually super positive from the morning - real, authentic acknowledgment of the work that you've all done and the importance of Slack right now."

Craig Broscow, a Salesforce vice president, said in a message that the comments were "overshadowing" employees' work and called on Benioff to publicly acknowledge that his comments upset "large segments of his employee base."

That didn't happen. Benioff has not issued any statements since the meeting. An excerpt of a recording of Benioff's keynote, viewed by Business Insider, was posted on the company's internal site without his ICE comments. Salesforce did not respond to repeated requests for comment about Benioff's remarks.

Benioff has a history of standing up for employees on political issues. In 2015, he and the company led a corporate boycott of Indiana in response to a religious freedom law and arranged a $50,000 relocation package to help an employee leave the state. Salesforce also offered to relocate Texas employees after it passed an anti-abortion law in 2021, which Benioff said he didn't come up with but has praised.

"Bring back the 2015 energy," one employee wrote on Slack on Tuesday.

Late last year, ahead of the company's Dreamforce conference, Benioff expressed support for President Donald Trump and said he thought the National Guard should be deployed to San Francisco. After being pilloried by some Bay Area politicians and residents, Benioff apologized.

Employees this week also resurfaced Benioff's previous statements, like those that came after high-profile killings of Minneapolis residents by federal immigration officers.

"As we witness the horrible violence this weekend in Minnesota, I want to check in with everyone," read part of Benioff's unreported statement, according to a screenshot viewed by Business Insider.

"So this was just lip service after all?" the employee who posted it wrote.

Agentforce under the microscope

Benioff is credited with popularizing the software-as-a-service model and, in the process, building one of the world's largest enterprise companies. His freewheeling, evangelical style has helped with that endeavor. More recently, AI has become a threat and perhaps an opportunity for that model.

As Business Insider reported late last year, Salesforce's strategy has centered on its Agentforce AI product, but some investors, analysts, clients, and even employees say Benioff may have placed too many chips on a bet that is yet to pay off.

Less than 2% of its customers were having more than 50 Agentforce conversations a week as of summer 2025, according to people with knowledge of internal reports. A Salesforce spokesperson at the time said those numbers are just one cut of the data and don't reflect actual adoption or how the tool is being used. Last quarter, the company increased its full-year revenue forecast, which the company said was thanks in part to some progress with Agentforce.

Overall, the company's stock has fallen 43% in the past year as it navigates uncertainty around demand for its AI services, the industry's high-stakes shift from traditional seat-based licensing to consumption-based pricing, intensifying competition from rivals like Microsoft and Oracle, and investor fears about how tools from AI companies like OpenAI will reshape the software landscape.

Five high-profile leaders have left the company since December, ahead of the company's new fiscal year on February 1, a time when companies often make leadership changes. Salesforce also laid off fewer than 1,000 employees around this time. Salesforce has appointed new leaders to replace the executives.

'Your absence was noted'

The day after Benioff's ICE jokes came without formal acknowledgement of the situation. Programming started with just a "bad" Blues Brothers parody that "made people on Slack cringe," employees said. "Just bad in a lame corporate way, not an evil way," one noted.

Following Benioff's jokes, employees swiftly started discussing ways to organize a response — such as stopping work for the day, a mass walk-off or call-off, and supporting ICE-impacted communities. Employees were also asked to sign a letter calling on Benioff to publicly denounce ICE, prohibit the agency from using its services, and support legislative efforts for civilian oversight. Business Insider obtained a copy of the letter, which cited Salesforce's pitch to ICE to use its AI technology and appears to have been drafted before Benioff's comments about the agency.

It's unclear if employees skipped work in protest, though some suggested they would in internal messages viewed by Business Insider. Some employees said they received an email from Salesforce scolding them for missing the programming at Tuesday's event after Benioff's comments and asking them to explain why.

"Your absence was noted during today's CKO programming," said an excerpt of the email posted to Slack, referring to the Company Kickoff. "During scheduled sessions, attendees were observed in hallways, bars, casinos, restaurants, and other areas across the hotel properties instead of attending sessions. This does not meet our expectations."

One employee wrote on Slack that the email included a short Google form to explain any "extenuating circumstances" and that the response was limited to 250 characters.

"You should not be punished for not wanting to be in an environment that made you or any of your colleagues feel psychologically or physically unsafe," one employee wrote on Slack.

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