Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com Inc., speaks during the WSJDLive Global Technology Conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. The conference brings together an unmatched group of top CEOs, founders, pioneers, investors and luminaries to explore tech opportunities emerging around the world.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Turbulence in the upper ranks at Salesforce isn’t sitting well with Wall Street.
In the three trading days since the Taylor news landed alongside Salesforce’s third-quarter earnings report, the stock has had two of its three worst days of the year, plunging 8.3% and 7.4%, respectively. Salesforce has now lost 47% of its value for the year, compared to the Nasdaq’s 28% drop, and is trading at its lowest since March 2020, the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Taylor, who joined Salesforce in 2016 through the acquisition of his startup Quip, said he’d “decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots.” Benioff said on the earnings call, “We have to let him be free, let him go, and I understand, but I don’t like it.”
Butterfield made it clear that he’s leaving for different reasons.
“I’m not going to do anything entrepreneurial,” Butterfield wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by CNBC. “As hackneyed as it might sound, I really am going to spend more time with my family (as well as work on some personal projects, focus on health and generally put time into those things which [are] harder to do when one is leading a large organization).”
While Taylor and Butterfield are the highest-profile exits, they’re far from alone among Salesforce’s executive ranks.
Last month, Salesforce said Gavin Patterson, the president and strategy chief, would be leaving in January, and on Thursday Mark Nelson, president and CEO of Salesforce’s Tableau product, tweeted that it was his last day.
Along with Butterfield, Slack is losing product chief Tamar Yehoshua and Jonathan Prince, senior vice president in charge of marketing, brand and communications, people familiar with the matter previously told CNBC. Noah Weiss, senior vice president of product at Slack, will succeed Yehoshua, Butterfield said in a Slack message. Butterfield is being succeeded by Lidiane Jones, an executive vice president at Salesforce who joined in 2019.
Salesforce’s three-day plunge
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‘Two elephants in the room’
Slack was a pandemic-inspired acquisition. With workers forced to communicate remotely, Slack’s popular chat app blew up. In a series of tweets on March 25, 2020, Butterfield said the company had experienced “early signs of a surge in teams created and new paid customers unlike anything we had ever seen,” adding that the shift from email to chat channels, “which we believed to be inevitable over 5-7 years just got fast-forwarded by 18 months.”
Salesforce was so jazzed about Slack’s expansion that it paid over $27 billion for the company at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 24, one of the highest multiples ever in software. Taylor’s name was all over the deal, even though he wasn’t yet co-CEO. Taylor reached out to Butterfield multiple times in August and September 2020 about a possible acquisition, and the two negotiated throughout the process, which culminated in an agreement announced on Dec. 1 of that year, according to a filing with the SEC.
Salesforce’s purchase of Slack closed in July 2021, and its stock peaked four months later at almost $310. Since then, it’s lost 57% of its value, closing on Monday at $133.93.
Like its high-valued tech peers, Salesforce has been hurt this year by soaring inflation and rising interest rates, which have pushed investors into parts of the market deemed safer in a slowdown. Salesforce’s results haven’t helped. Last week, the company reported third-quarter revenue growth of 14%, the slowest expansion for any period since the company’s IPO in 2004. Its forecast for the fourth quarter is for growth of 8% to 10%.
In a break from third-quarter tradition, Salesforce neglected to provide guidance for its next fiscal year.
Analysts at Guggenheim wrote in a report that there were “two elephants in the room.” The first was omitting guidance for the coming year.
“The second elephant in the room is why Bret Taylor decided to give up his high-profile co-CEO and vice chair position after only a year,” wrote the Guggenheim analysts, who have the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock. The analysts reminded clients that three years ago, Keith Block resigned as co-CEO after 18 months on the job and wrote that “the company seems to have struggled since.”
After Taylor’s announcement last week, Wedbush analysts wrote that, “the Street will view this as a shocker with Taylor one of the mainstays in the CRM strategy.”
A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment beyond reiterating a statement the company sent earlier regarding Butterfield’s departure.
On Thursday, Wolfe Research downgraded Salesforce stock to the equivalent of hold from a buy. They wrote that the company is moving into “a new and difficult chapter” after execution errors, big-name departures and slowing revenue growth.
The only day in 2022 that Salesforce’s stock has been hit harder than it was Thursday or Monday was at the very beginning of the year. On Jan. 5, UBS downgraded Salesforce and Adobe, telling clients that enterprise tech spending was pulled forward by the pandemic, leading to slower continued growth for the two companies.
Neptune and OpenAI have collaborated on a metrics dashboard to help teams that are building foundation models. The companies will work “even more closely together” because of the acquisition, Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź said in a blog.
The startup will wind down its external services in the coming months, Niedźwiedź said. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows,” OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a statement. “We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn.”
OpenAI has acquired several companies this year.
It purchased a small interface startup called Software Applications Incorporated for an undisclosed sum in October, product development startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in September and Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion in May.
Neptune had raised more than $18 million in funding from investors including Almaz Capital and TDJ Pitango Ventures, according to its website. Neptune’s deal with OpenAI is still subject to customary closing conditions.
“I am truly grateful to our customers, investors, co-founders, and colleagues who have made this journey possible,” Niedźwiedź said. “It was the ride of a lifetime already, yet still I believe this is only the beginning.”
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron said on Wednesday that it plans to stop selling memory to consumers to focus on meeting demand for high-powered artificial intelligence chips.
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”
Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is creating shortages for inputs like memory as a handful of companies commit to spend hundreds of billions in the next few years to build massive data centers. Memory, which is used by computers to store data for short periods of time, is facing a global shortage.
Micron shares are up about 175% this year, though they slipped 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.
AI chips, like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AdvancedMicro Devices, use large amounts of the most advanced memory. For example, the current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192GB of memory per graphics processor. Google’s latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, needs 192GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Memory is also used in phones and computers, but with lower specs, and much lower quantities — many laptops only come with 16GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that tinkerers could use to build their own PCs or upgrade their laptops. Crucial also sold solid-state hard drives.
Micron competes against SK Hynix and Samsung in the market for high-bandwidth memory, but it’s the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts have said that SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary memory supplier.
Micron supplies AMD, which says its AI chips use more memory than others, providing them a performance advantage for running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, comes with 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Micron’s Crucial business was not broken out in company earnings. However, its cloud memory business unit showed 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.
Analysts at Goldman on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron’s stock to $205 from $180, though they maintained their hold recommendation. The analysts wrote in a note to clients that due to “continued pricing momentum” in memory, they “expect healthy upside to Street estimates” when Micron reports quarterly results in two weeks.
A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on whether the move would result in layoffs.
“Micron intends to reduce impact on team members due to this business decision through redeployment opportunities into existing open positions within the company,” the company said in its release.
Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.
The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.
The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.
AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.
Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.
In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.
In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.
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“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.
The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.
But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.
The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.