37 Fun Facts About Salesforce

In 2016, Salesforce weighed buying which social network before deciding against a bid?

Twitter's shares sank on the news, while Salesforce's rose more than 5%, because its shareholders had questioned the match.

Salesforce's founder spent 13 years at which company, becoming its youngest-ever vice president?

Oracle bumped his keynote at its own OpenWorld conference in 2011, so he gave the talk at a nearby restaurant instead.

At which company did Salesforce's founder intern as a USC student, writing assembly code?

Apple took him on as a Macintosh programming intern, and he had already founded a video-game company, Liberty Software, as a teenager.

Salesforce's early guerrilla slogan, aimed at rival Siebel, declared the end of what?

Software was the target: Salesforce hired actors to stage a mock protest with anti-software signs outside a Siebel Systems conference.

Under what ticker symbol did Salesforce list on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2004?

CRM began trading weeks late, because Salesforce put off its planned May listing after its chief executive took part in a newspaper profile during the SEC's quiet period.

In 2021, Salesforce offered to move staff out of which state over its new abortion law?

Salesforce acted once Texas's law went into effect and the US Supreme Court declined to halt it, offering to move staff's families too.

Which company did Salesforce agree to buy for $27.7 billion in December 2020?

Slack grew out of an internal chat tool that a small game studio built while making an online game that later flopped.

The messaging app Salesforce bought in 2021 is named for an acronym of what?

Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge fit the app's goal: Butterfield pitched it as a way to end internal company email.

Before pivoting to messaging, Stewart Butterfield's startup Tiny Speck built which failed online game?

Glitch shut down in 2012, and Butterfield's earlier hit, Flickr, had likewise grown out of tools built for an abandoned online game.

Which visual analytics company did Salesforce buy in 2019?

Tableau made headlines in 2010 when it removed its WikiLeaks cable charts after Senator Joe Lieberman publicly called for it.

Which integration and API-management company did Salesforce acquire in 2018 for $6.5 billion?

It grew out of Ross Mason's open-source Mule project of 2003 and was originally called MuleSource.

Which Ruby-only cloud platform did Salesforce buy in December 2010 for $212 million?

Heroku later scrapped its free plans in 2022, saying staff were spending an extraordinary amount of effort fighting fraud and abuse of them.

Which data management company did Salesforce agree to buy for about $8 billion in May 2025?

Informatica already had Salesforce money behind it: Salesforce and Microsoft had joined its $5.3 billion buyout in 2015.

Which email-marketing firm, bought for $2.5 billion in 2013, became Marketing Cloud?

ExactTarget's arrival led Salesforce to cut about 200 overlapping jobs, and in 2014 its brand gave way to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce's 2016 e-commerce acquisition, for $2.8 billion, was which company?

Demandware became the core of a new division, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and dropped its own name within months.

Salesforce's 2016 AI platform is named after which scientist?

Albert Einstein was the chief executive's pick. His own marketers pushed for a plain name like Salesforce AI, and he overruled them.

In late 2024 Salesforce rolled out which agentic AI product, succeeding its earlier AI platform?

Agentforce, unveiled at Dreamforce in September 2024, lets companies build autonomous AI agents; Benioff said in September 2025 that agents handled about half of support interactions.

What is the name of Salesforce's free online learning platform, released in 2014?

Trailhead launched at Dreamforce 2014 as a free, gamified site for learning Salesforce skills; its badge-collecting learners call themselves Trailblazers.

What is the proprietary Java-like language used to build apps on the Salesforce Platform?

Apex runs on servers shared with other customers, so Salesforce caps what each piece of code may use, stopping one runaway program from hogging them.

Which company did Salesforce replace in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020?

ExxonMobil had been the world's most valuable company as recently as 2013, yet by 2020 it was being dropped from the Dow.

Salesforce's corporate culture is built around which Hawaiian concept?

Ohana also names the top floors of several Salesforce towers, which the company lends to nonprofits free of charge for their events.

Salesforce's '1-1-1' model gives one percent of equity, one percent of product, and one percent of what?

The 1-1-1 model donates 1% of equity, 1% of product and 1% of employee time to charity; Salesforce co-founded Pledge 1% in 2014 to spread it.

Which magazine did Salesforce's founder and his wife Lynne buy for $190 million in September 2018?

Marc and Lynne Benioff bought Time from Meredith Corporation for $190 million in September 2018, holding it personally through Time USA, LLC rather than through Salesforce.

Salesforce Tower overtook which skyscraper as San Francisco's tallest in 2017?

Transamerica Pyramid drew harsh criticism when its plans came out in 1969, yet it has since become an icon of the city.

Which architect designed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco?

César Pelli won the 2007 contest with a 1,200-foot design, but the tower was later scaled back and tops out at 1,070 feet.

What discovery closed San Francisco's Salesforce Transit Center for repairs in September 2018?

Buses returned in mid-2019; its 5.4-acre rooftop Salesforce Park is reached by a free aerial tram from street level.

Indiana's tallest building, Salesforce Tower since 2017, was previously named for which bank?

The Indianapolis tower opened in 1990 as Bank One Tower, became Chase Tower in 2005 after JPMorgan Chase absorbed Bank One, and took the Salesforce name in 2017.

Which former Facebook CTO and Google Maps co-creator was Salesforce co-CEO from 2021 to 2023?

Bret Taylor left at the end of January 2023, saying he had decided to return to his entrepreneurial roots.

Which Salesforce co-CEO stepped down in February 2020, leaving Marc Benioff as sole chairman and chief executive?

Keith Block gave up the co-CEO job after less than two years but stayed on as an adviser to Benioff.

Which Hollywood actor was reported in 2023 to earn about $10 million a year from Salesforce as a 'creative advisor'?

Matthew McConaughey's deal came to light weeks after Salesforce cut about 8,000 jobs, and it was reportedly big enough to need the compensation committee's approval.

Salesforce fired two engineers in 2017 over a tool whose name was an anagram of which hacking framework?

Metasploit's anagram, MEATPISTOL, was unveiled at DEF CON after the engineers missed a message telling them not to go on stage.

Which public cloud did Salesforce name its preferred infrastructure provider in May 2016?

Amazon Web Services let Salesforce serve countries whose laws keep customer data at home, without building its own data centers there.

Salesforce backed a 2018 San Francisco business tax to fund what?

Homeless services were the aim of Proposition C, which passed after Salesforce and its chief put nearly $8 million behind a tax the company itself would pay.

Which two companies joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average alongside Salesforce in 2020?

Amgen and Honeywell came in with Salesforce after a tech giant's 4-for-1 stock split cut the price-weighted index's exposure to technology.

Which word-processing app did Salesforce buy in 2016?

Quip lasted a decade inside Salesforce, which said in March 2026 that it would retire the app and end renewals after March 1, 2027.

Microsoft beat Salesforce in a 2016 bidding war for which company?

LinkedIn went to Microsoft for about $26 billion, and Salesforce then urged European regulators to investigate the deal as a threat to competition.

Which immigrant-rights non-profit rejected a $250,000 Salesforce donation in 2018 over its border-agency contracts?

RAICES refused the gift over Salesforce's border-agency software contracts, which Salesforce kept despite a petition from its own employees.