Marc Benioff’s deal for Time may be ammunition for Donald Trump

Salesforce CEO Marc
Benioff.
Photo by Kimberly White/Getty
Images for Fortune

• Marc Benioff, the billionaire
  CEO of Salesforce, and his wife Lynne Benioff have bought
  Time magazine.
• US President Donald Trump is fascinated by Time
  magazine, particularly who the publication chooses to put on
  its front cover as person of the year.
• Trump has a tendency to conflate publications with
  their owners, as he has done with Jeff Bezos when The
  Washington Post writes negative coverage about the White
  House.
• Trump is developing a taste for attacking tech, and negative
  coverage in Time could provide him with more ammunition in the
  future.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff may find
their purchase of Time magazine comes with strings attached.

The two
announced on Sunday that they were buying the iconic American
magazine for $190 million (£145 million), only eight months
after its previous owner, Meredith Corp, completed its
acquisition of the title.

Tycoons buying press titles is nothing new, but Benioff’s move
signals something of a new trend in tech billionaires acquiring
publications.

He’s the third big tech mogul to buy a print title
after Amazon boss Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in
2013 for $250 million, and biotech billionaire Patrick
Soon-Shiong acquired the LA Times earlier this year.

Like Bezos, the Benioffs may find the acquisition draws the
scrutiny of US president Donald Trump, for better or worse.

Trump is fascinated by Time, and particularly who the magazine
chooses to feature on its covers and as its annual “Person of the
Year.”

At one point,
the publication had to ask Trump to remove fake covers
showing him as its person of the year from several of his golf
clubs. Trump did appear once as person of the year in 2016, the
year he was elected president.

Trump has tweeted about real Time covers on numerous occasions.

There was the time Trump claimed that he shunned the
honour.
Time disputed the claim, saying there was “not a speck of
truth” to his comments.

A year earlier, he was actually Time’s person of the
year.

He also made the front page in 2015.

There was the time Trump was unhappy that German
Chancellor Angela Merkel was chosen as person of the year, the
first woman named since 1986.

The president has also ruminated, like he does with The New York
Times, about Time’s imminent demise and
who should run the magazine.
Bill O’Reilly, the political commentator referenced in this
tweet, was forced out of Fox News this year after multiple
accusations of sexual harassment.

Donald Trump will use publications to attack their owners

Time Photo-Illustration/Getty

Trump has, in the case of the Washington Post, shown a tendency
to conflate publications with their owners.

He’s attacked Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and the Post on several
occasions. He’s claimed the Washington Post is just a lobbying
tool for Bezos, and called the newspaper the “Amazon Washington
Post.”

The Post has, along with much of the rest of the American media,
published numerous unflattering stories about Trump and his
administration.

Marc Benioff may feel that he is comparatively safe. He has been
circumspect about Donald Trump, originally proclaiming support
for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but subsequently engaging with Trump
and even praising him.

Benioff notably
avoided making negative remarks about Trump during election
campaigning. And in March last year, he met with Trump and

pitched him a jobs programme that the president was
reportedly interested in pursuing.

And he was one of the few business leaders
to praise Trump at Davos this January, where the president
gave a speech to woo big business but also used the platform to
attack the media.

” thought it was a great speech,” Benioff said at the time. “I
thought his economic narrative has become greatly enhanced now
that the tax cuts have passed.” In August, the Salesforce CEO
attributed
a boost in business to Trump’s tax cuts.

Time

But despite this caution, and the fact that Time will have no
connection to Salesforce, Benioff may find himself under attack
for any negative coverage Time chooses to run on the president.

The publication
dramatically put Donald Trump on its cover earlier this
summer looking sternly down at a crying girl, to highlight the
administration’s harsh border policy with Mexico. It has also
produced a series of covers
depicting Trump being battered by stormy weather in the Oval
Office.

Benioff might need to brace himself for some presidential Twitter
ire when the acquisition completes.

There’s also a risk the deal drags the tech sector as a whole
deeper into Trump’s firing line. The president has developed a
taste for attacking Amazon and, more recently, Google. Negative
coverage in Time could provide him with more ammunition in the
future.