The people who work for Marc Benioff’s company Salesforce are really mad about gun violence in America and are taking action. More than 4,000 of them sent an open letter to the Salesforce management demanding that their company repudiate America’s National Rifle Association (NRA) and drop the organization as a customer.
The letter was sent in response to the murder of 24 people at a local high school in Uvalde Texas by a teenager armed with automatic rifles. The incident traumatized the nation and has sparked a fierce renewal of the country’s debate on gun control laws. The NRA usually lobbies the U.S. Congress against the passage of such laws.
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“It’s not in our power to get background checks or other gun control measures passed by Congress, but we can effect change by ending our commercial relationship with our customer, the National Rifle Association,” read the letter.
The Salesforce employees are concerned that the NRA will continue to use their company’s services to promote its campaigns to block new gun control laws. The employees added in their letter, “It is unconscionable to consider their use of Marketing Cloud to capitalize on mass shootings.”
“Based on past history,” added the letter, “it is likely the NRA is already upping, or preparing to up, their Marketing Cloud usage in response to this tragedy, not to prevent future tragedies from happening, but to sow fear, sell guns, and abet future atrocities.”
Marc Benioff is Chair, Co-CEO, and Co-Founder of Salesforce. Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, and it is now a Fortune 150 company with 75,000 employees, guided by four core values — trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. The company has been recognized as the Most Innovative Company by Forbes, a Best Place to Work by Fortune, and the 10th Most Admired Company in the World by Fortune.
Before launching Salesforce, Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle, where he was the youngest vice president in company history. When he was 14 years old, he sold his first piece of software, “How to Juggle,” for $75. He founded his first company, Liberty Software, which created video games, at the age of 15.
Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. That provides customer relationship management (CRM) services. It also offers clients enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. Such services are still an absolute necessity for any business and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
