Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce, speaks during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 18, 2024.
Halil Sagirkaya | Anadolu | Getty Images
As Salesforce welcomes tens of thousands of people to San Francisco for its annual Dreamforce conference, CEO Marc Benioff has found himself in the center of local controversy on a national issue.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Friday, Benioff appeared eager for President Donald Trump to send federal troops to his company’s hometown, inserting himself into a national debate about whether the president should call the National Guard into various Democrat-led cities that Trump has maligned.
The Trump administration recently deployed the National Guard to Portland and Chicago, sparking protests and lawsuits.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told the Times.
Benioff subsequently softened his comments, writing on X on Sunday that safety is “first and foremost, the responsibility of our city and state leaders.” But a heated online conversation was already well underway.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who moved to Texas from California, said federal intervention is needed to deal with crime in San Francisco. In posts on his social network X on Sunday, he said it would be “the only solution at this point,” and that “nothing else has or will work.” A day earlier, Musk, who has drawn criticism for his own drug use, characterized downtown San Francisco as a “drug zombie apocalypse.”
Musk still has big business in and around San Francisco. His artificial intelligence startup xAI, which owns X, has a sizable office in the city, and his brain computer interface company, Neuralink, recently leased a large property in South San Francisco. Tesla relocated to Texas, but the automaker’s engineering headquarters remains in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco.
Musk’s call for U.S. troops came in response to social media posts by Tom Wolf, who describes himself as a “a formerly homeless recovering addict in San Francisco,” and an “advocate for addiction recovery.”
“If you want to keep federal troops out of San Francisco, remove the organized drug dealers and 80% of the problem goes away,” Wolf wrote. “If you don’t, you reap what you sow.”
Musk shared Wolf’s post to his more than 227 million listed followers on X.
Neither Benioff nor Musk immediately responded to requests for comment. CNBC also reached out to Tesla, xAI and Salesforce for comment but did not hear back.
Local officials loudly opposed the idea of bringing in federal troops.
Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s district attorney, wrote on X after the Benioff interview that, “I can’t be silent any longer.”
Jenkins accused Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of turning “so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups,” and said that if anyone is using excessive force or illegally harassing residents, “I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who defeated incumbent London Breed in November in part by promising to clean up San Francisco’s streets, wrote on X on Sunday that “crime is down 30% and tent encampments are at an all-time low.” He didn’t directly address Benioff or Dreamforce, but noted that tens of thousand of people are coming to the city for activities including concerts and Fleet Week, and that public safety is critical.
“San Francisco is on the rise,” he wrote
In Benioff’s follow-up comments after his interview with the Times, the Salesforce CEO praised Lurie’s efforts to increase police hiring and retain law enforcement.
Dreamforce, which launched in 2003, kicks off on Tuesday and runs through Thursday. The event is being held at the Moscone Center and occupies much of the surrounding area in downtown San Francisco.
Garry Tan, CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X that “We don’t need the National Guard,” but he used his post to go after a frequent local target for techies: Chesa Boudin and progressives.
Boudin was district attorney in San Francisco until 2022, when he was removed in a recall election after critics railed against what they viewed as his unwillingness to prosecute violent criminals. Now the judges are the problem, Tan said.
“We need new judges who are not hardcore Chesa Boudin-style activists who work to keep drug dealers out of jail even though the police, the district attorney and the people of SF want them locked up,” he wrote. “It’s shockingly that simple in SF.”
But the first full trading week of the month saw stocks caught in November rains.
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average each lost more than 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite shed around 3% — that’s its largest weekly loss since the tech-heavy index slumped 10% in the week ended April 4.
A few months ago, tariffs were the shadows that stalked stocks. Now, it’s fears that artificial intelligence-related stocks are trading at prices disconnected from what the firms are actually worth.
“You’ve got trillions of dollars tied up in seven stocks, for example. So, it’s inevitable, with that kind of concentration, that there will be a worry about, ‘You know, when will this bubble burst?‘” CEO of DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank,Tan Su Shan told CNBC.
“It’s likely there’ll be a 10 to 20% drawdown in equity markets sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” Solomon said Tuesday at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong.
That said, a pullback isn’t necessarily bad for stocks. It could even present “buying opportunities” for investors, according to Glen Smith, chief investment officer at GDS Wealth Management.
After all, earnings have been “reassuring” despite worries about tech stocks’ high valuations, Kiran Ganesh, multi-asset strategist at UBS, told CNBC. That means the rain might not last and the rally could find a way to run a little longer.
— CNBC’s Lee Ying Shan, Hugh Leask and Lim Hui Jie contributed to this report.
China rolls back curbs on rare earths. Beijing said Friday that it would suspend some restrictions on exports of rare earth elements. The move follows talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Oct. 30.
Nexperia impasse shows signs of easing. The Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement Sunday that it had taken steps to allow exports of certain chips from Nexperia’s China facility. Shares of Nexperia parent Wingtech Technology climbed Monday.
U.S. government on track to end shutdown. The Senate on Sunday night stateside passed the first stage of a deal that would end the shutdown. The procedural measure allows other votes essential to the agreement to be held starting on Monday.
[PRO] Chinese sectors benefiting from AI. Earnings season in the country is underway, and while it’s spotlighting some AI-related sectors that have seen growth of up to 57%, others are facing a decline because of fierce price competition.
Fundraisers and fraudsters are presenting themselves as family office representatives, seeking to dupe gullible investors — and then there are also imposters who are in it just for an “ego boost,” several industry veterans told CNBC.
An information vacuum seems to have encouraged imposters. In many markets, genuine single family offices, or SFOs, are exempt from registering so long as they manage only family money. That privacy norm often makes verification hard, said industry experts.
China has rolled back a number of restrictions on its export of critical minerals and rare earth materials to the United States, in a sign that a trade truce between the world’s two largest economies is holding.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said Friday that it would suspend some export controls on critical minerals used in military hardware, semiconductors and other high-tech industries for a year.
The suspended restrictions, first imposed on Oct. 9, include limits on the export of certain rare earth elements, lithium battery materials, and processing technologies.
The export relaxations follow talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30.
Beijing also reversed retaliatory curbs on exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and other so-called super-hard materials such as synthetic diamonds and boron nitrides. Those measures, introduced in December 2024, were widely seen as retaliation for Washington’s expanded semiconductor export restrictions on China.
China classifies such materials as “dual-use items,” meaning they can be used for both civilian and military purposes.
Beyond military applications, these critical minerals are used across the semiconductor industry and other high-tech sectors — sectors at the heart of U.S.-China trade tensions.
Beijing has also suspended the stricter end-user and end-use verification checks for exports of dual-use graphite to the U.S., which were imposed in December 2024 alongside the broader export ban.
China dominates global production of most critical minerals and rare earth elements and has increasingly used its export policies as leverage in trade disputes.
As part of the latest China-U.S. trade deal, the U.S. has agreed to several concessions, including lowering tariffs on Chinese imports by 10 percentage points, and suspending Trump’s heightened “reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports until Nov. 10, 2026.
The U.S. will also postpone a rule announced Sept. 29 that would have blacklisted majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on its entity list.
But the first full trading week of the month saw stocks caught in November rains.
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average each lost more than 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite shed around 3% — that’s its largest weekly loss since the tech-heavy index slumped 10% in the week ended April 4.
A few months ago, tariffs were the shadows that stalked stocks. Now, it’s fears that artificial intelligence-related stocks are trading at prices disconnected from what the firms are actually worth.
“You’ve got trillions of dollars tied up in seven stocks, for example. So, it’s inevitable, with that kind of concentration, that there will be a worry about, ‘You know, when will this bubble burst?‘” CEO of DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank,Tan Su Shan told CNBC.
“It’s likely there’ll be a 10 to 20% drawdown in equity markets sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” Solomon said Tuesday at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong.
That said, a pullback isn’t necessarily bad for stocks. It could even present “buying opportunities” for investors, according to Glen Smith, chief investment officer at GDS Wealth Management.
After all, earnings have been “reassuring” despite worries about tech stocks’ high valuations, Kiran Ganesh, multi-asset strategist at UBS, told CNBC. That means the rain might not last and the rally could find a way to run a little longer.
— CNBC’s Lee Ying Shan, Hugh Leask and Lim Hui Jie contributed to this report.
China consumer prices pick up in October. The consumer price index, released Sunday, showed a 0.2% growth year on year. It beats analysts’ expectations of zero growth and is the first month since June that prices rose.
U.S. government on track to end shutdown. Enough Democratic senators had agreed to vote for a deal that would fund the U.S. government through the end of January, a person familiar with the deal told CNBC.
Another missed jobs report. The ongoing U.S. government shutdown — which is now the longest ever — means the Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t release its monthly employment data. Here’s what economists would have expected the report to show.
[PRO] Stocks that could bounce after sell-off. Using CNBC Pro’s stock screener tool, we found several names that are oversold, according to their 14-day relative strength index. This implies they could be due for a recovery in prices.
Fundraisers and fraudsters are presenting themselves as family office representatives, seeking to dupe gullible investors — and then there are also imposters who are in it just for an “ego boost,” several industry veterans told CNBC.
An information vacuum seems to have encouraged imposters. In many markets, genuine single family offices, or SFOs, are exempt from registering so long as they manage only family money. That privacy norm often makes verification hard, said industry experts.