Salesforce’s Skyrocketing Stock Pushes Cofounder Marc Benioff’s Net Worth Over $10 Billion

Marc Benioff, who cofounded cloud software giant Salesforce in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco two decades ago, is now one of just 187 people in the world with a fortune greater than $10 billion.

Salesforce shares surged 25% to $270.6 at 1:45 pm ET on Wednesday after the company reported significant growth in revenues for the second quarter, during which sales rose 29% to $5.2 billion. Benioff, who serves as CEO and owns about 4% of the company’s stock, saw his net worth rise by 22% to $10.5 billion—the most he’s ever been worth.

“It’s humbling to have had one of the best quarters in Salesforce’s history against the backdrop of multiple crises seriously affecting our communities around the world,” Benioff wrote in an earnings announcement released Wednesday.

With more employees working from home during the pandemic, higher demand for Salesforce’s cloud computing software has driven the firm’s operating margins to a record high. Shares of the company have risen 75% since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11, boosting Benioff’s net worth by nearly $5 billion from where it stood in March, when he appeared on Forbes World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $5.8 billion. He’s now the 175th richest person in the world, according to Forbes, up from No. 274 in March.

Benioff, an active philanthropist, has promised to give at least half of his fortune away as a  signatory of The Giving Pledge. In 2010, Benioff and his wife Lynne donated $100 million to the University of California at San Francisco to build a new children’s hospital, now known as the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. At the beginning of the pandemic in March, Benioff pledged to continue paying hourly workers at Salesforce and at TIME magazine, which he purchased in 2018. He also led an effort with other private-sector firms, including Alibaba, FedEx, Uber and Walmart, to procure more than 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment for frontline workers in Ecuador, India, France, the U.K. and 10 U.S. states.