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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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Slack’s new head just denounced Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s ICE jokes in internal messages

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Salesforce executives, including Slack’s new general manager, addressed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s jokes about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to internal messages.

Benioff angered some employees with the comments on Tuesday, including one about ICE surveilling employees’ travel.

“I want to acknowledge the jokes that happened this morning at CKO,” 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.

Salesforce has yet to respond to repeated requests about Benioff’s comments and did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

“I assume there will be a statement that addresses them,” Seaman wrote. “If there isn’t, I’ll talk about it in the next all Slack call, and then 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.

Salesforce recently promoted Seaman to executive vice president and general manager of Slack, following Slack CEO Denise Dresser’s departure in December to become OpenAI’s chief revenue officer. The company also promoted Joe Inzerillo, its previous chief digital officer, to president of enterprise and AI technology, overseeing both Slack and Agentforce.

Craig Broscow, a VP, also addressed Benioff’s comments on Slack, calling on Benioff to publicly respond.

“Marc has so much valuable insight to share on the Agentic Transformation,” Broscow wrote in a message viewed by Business Insider. “And the quarter was so strong. Everyone’s excited to be here. Most of us love our work and appreciate the privilege of working here. But for the senior leaders who I’m sure follow this thread to engage employee sentiment: this is overshadowing everything else and for everyone who has the courage to post there are 100+ people in Vegas who share their deep disappointment. It would be a step in the right direction and for Marc to acknowledge as soon as possible – ideally publicly – that his attempted joke was extremely upsetting to large segments of his employee base.”

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Marc Benioff says a documentary about Character.AI’s effects on children was ‘the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life’

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Marc Benioff shared what he thinks is the darkest aspect of AI.

On an episode of the “TBPN” show streamed on Wednesday, the Salesforce CEO said that he couldn’t “believe what he was watching” when he saw a “60 Minutes” documentary on chatbot-building startup Character.AI and its impact on children.

“We don’t know how these models work. And to see how it was working with these children, and then the kids ended up taking their lives,” he said, “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Character.AI allows users to build custom chatbots that can emulate the behaviour of a close friend or romantic partner. The startup did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment about Benioff’s remarks.

“Tech companies hate regulation. They hate it,” Benioff said. “Except for one regulation they love: Section 230. Which means that those companies are not held accountable for those suicides.”

Section 230 of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act protects social media companies from liability for user-generated content while also letting them moderate posts. Tech giants use Section 230 as a common defense strategy, saying they are just platforms and not responsible for what users say and do on them.

“Step one is let’s just hold people accountable,” he said. “Let’s reshape, reform, revise Section 230, and let’s try to save as many lives as we can by doing that.”

Executives, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, have repeatedly defended the regulation in Congress, asking for it to be expanded rather than removed.

Last week, Google and Character.AI agreed to settle multiple lawsuits from families whose teenagers died by suicide or hurt themselves after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbots.

These negotiations are among the first settlements in lawsuits that accuse AI tools of contributing to mental health crises and suicides among teenagers. OpenAI and Meta are facing similar lawsuits as they, along with others, race to build large language models that sound more friendly and helpful, ultimately keeping users coming back.




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