Meet Marc Benioff, new Time Magazine owner and billionaire tech CEO
FBN’s Susan Li discusses how Time Magazine was sold to Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff for $190 million and Coca-Cola’s early stage talks with cannabis producer Aurora Cannabis.
Marc Benioff, the new owner of Time Magazine, is the latest in a series of prominent tech CEOs who have added media outlets to their business portfolios.
Benioff, 53, is best known for founding Salesforce, an early pioneer of cloud technology, in 1999. He still serves as co-CEO and chairman of the San Francisco-based company, which earned more than $8 billion in revenue in 2017.
Benioff and his wife, Lynne, paid $190 million to acquire Time from Meredith Corp., the Wall Street Journal reported. They are said to view the acquisition as an investment and will not be involved in the day-to-day journalistic operations at Time, mirroring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ policy after his acquisition of the Washington Post in 2013.
“We’re investing in a company with tremendous impact on the world, one that is also an incredibly strong business,” Benioff told the Journal. “That’s what we’re looking for when we invest as a family.”
Benioff has a personal net worth of $6.6 billion, according to Forbes. Aside from his role at Salesforce, Benioff is a former executive at the venerable computer tech firm Oracle and an active philanthropist.
The billionaire invests in dozens of tech startups and owns property in San Francisco and Hawaii, Forbes reported.
Several prominent figures in the tech world have invested in media outlets in recent years. Laurene Powell Jobs, the businesswoman and widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, purchased a majority stake in Atlantic Media, the publisher of The Atlantic, in 2017, while biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this year.