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A recording of CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote was posted on Salesforce’s internal site. His jokes about ICE weren’t included.

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  • Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made jokes about ICE during a keynote at an employee event.
  • The company posted a recording of the keynote without Benioff’s ICE remarks.
  • The comments drew criticism from many employees, including executives.

A recording of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote this week was posted on the company’s internal site, and his jokes about Immigration and Customs Enforcement weren’t included, according to internal messages and an excerpt of the video viewed by Business Insider.

“The recording of Marc’s CKO keynote is posted,” one employee wrote in a message on the company’s internal Slack, referring to the “Company Kickoff” event for employees. “Anyone going to watch it to see the ICE ‘jokes’ will discover they have been edited out of the recording.”

An excerpt of the recording viewed by Business Insider appears to show a jump cut during the introduction of Benioff’s speech, where the frame switches to a view of the audience, and then Benioff appears on the opposite side of the stage.

Several employees who heard the remarks told Business Insider that Benioff asked people in the audience to stand if they came from outside the US, and then apparently joked that ICE agents were in the back room. Benioff also complained about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, the people said.

Salesforce hasn’t responded to multiple requests about Benioff’s comments and did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Salesforce executives, including Slack’s new general manager, addressed Benioff’s jokes. Slack general manager Rob Seaman wrote in an internal Slack message viewed by Business Insider: “I cannot defend or explain them. They do not align with my personal values and I know this to be the case for many of you as well.”

Some Salesforce employees said they received an email asking them to explain their absence from the event following Benioff’s remarks.

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Henry Chandonnet is pictured

Sam Altman included a subtle dig at Mark Zuckerberg in his message to employees

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Don’t expect to see Sam Altman lamenting the absence of “masculine energy” in corporate America to Joe Rogan anytime soon.

The OpenAI CEO sent employees a message on Slack criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and appears to have taken the opportunity to also take a subtle jab at his rival, Mark Zuckerberg.

The reference can be found where Altman wrote that OpenAI aims to “not get blown around by changing fashions.”

“We didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular,” Altman told employees.

Last year, Zuckerberg championed a return to masculinity at Meta on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

“The masculine energy, I think, is good,” Zuckerberg said in the January podcast episode. “Society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was trying to get away from it.”

Zuckerberg described the merits of a corporate culture that “celebrates the aggression” of business.

The Meta CEO said that the intent of corporate culture’s shift away from masculinity was good. Women likely feel that companies are “too masculine,” he told Rogan, and that things are “biased” against them. But the shift had gone too far, the Facebook cofounder said.

“It’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad.”

Altman also wrote in his memo that OpenAI didn’t “become super woke when that was popular.”

Meta didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on Altman’s remark.

The latest in an AI rivalry

Altman and Zuckerberg are currently engaged in a talent war for top AI researchers and engineers.

Zuckerberg has attempted to poach OpenAI employees with eye-popping compensation packages, which Altman in June said included $100 million signing bonuses.

While Altman at the time said that he was happy that “at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Zuckerberg successfully hired away some prominent OpenAI talent.

The Meta CEO, who even hand-delivered soup to an OpenAI employee he was attempting to poach, hired away ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao and three researchers who helped build OpenAI’s Zurich office.




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