Salesforce executive exits help push stock to its lowest point since March 2020
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.
On Monday, the company announced the departure of Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, who joined Salesforce last year as part of its biggest acquisition ever. Last Wednesday, Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who orchestrated the Slack deal, said he was leaving —exactly a year after getting promoted to share the top job with Marc Benioff.
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
CNBC
‘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.
WATCH: Salesforce shares under pressure after co-CEO Bret Taylor steps down
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike