Days after suggesting that President Donald Trump should send federal troops to San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is facing some consequences.

Prominent startup investor Ron Conway, who backed companies including Google, Airbnb and Stripe, resigned from the board of the Salesforce Foundation on Thursday, CNBC has confirmed. Conway is a longtime Democratic donor who was a member of VCs for Kamala, and donated around $500,000 to at least two funds tied to Kamala Harris’ unsuccessful 2024 election campaign.

The New York Times was first to report on Conway’s departure from the Salesforce Foundation. A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed his exit in an e-mailed statement.

“We have deep gratitude for Ron Conway and his incredible contributions to the Salesforce Foundation Board for over a decade,” the spokesperson said, noting that the group has donated, “$250 million to public schools and education nonprofits to advance opportunity and access for young people, including $30 million announced this week.”

The Trump administration recently deployed the National Guard to Portland, Oregon and Chicago, sparking protests and lawsuits and resulting in citizens and immigrants being detained without legal representation.

In a story published late last week in the New York Times, Benioff indicated that he would welcome troops to San Francisco, home to Salesforce. The company’s annual Dreamforce conference began in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told the Times.

Benioff later appeared to walk back his comments, writing on X that safety is “first and foremost, the responsibility of our city and state leaders.” However, by that point Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other right-wing figures had seized on his original comments, amplifying them to their audiences.

Musk, who has drawn criticism for his personal drug use, characterized downtown San Francisco as a “drug zombie apocalypse.” And on Wednesday, Trump called San Francisco “a mess,” and suggested possibly sending in the National Guard.

According to the Times, Conway told Benioff in an email that their “values were no longer aligned.” While Benioff has donated to members of both parties, he has supported Democrats for president, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

Conway is founder and managing partner of SV Angel, an early-stage venture firm. He has long been an advocate for tech in San Francisco, having founded trade organization sf.citi and helping start FWD.us, which focused on immigration reform.

The Salesforce Foundation isn’t his only connection to Benioff’s philanthropic efforts. Conway is also a large donor to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

Conway didn’t respond to a request for comment.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco leaders on Wednesday issued statements and held press conferences to deliver the message that federal troops are not welcome in the city, and that crime is coming down.

Conway has supported Newsom, including in 2021, when he opposed a recall effort against the Democratic governor.

WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sits down with Jim Cramer at Dreamforce 2025

EssilorLuxottica said a healthy amount of its revenue growth in the third quarter was due to its partnership with Meta, primarily from its Ray-Ban brand, to develop and sell smart glasses.

“Clearly there is a lift coming from Ray-Ban Meta wearables as a product category,” CFO Stefano Grassi said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

The European eyewear company said sales in in the quarter grew 11.7% year-over-year to 6.9 billion euros (about $8 billion) from 6.44 billion euros a year earlier. Of that growth, more than 4 percentage points came from wearables, which includes the Meta products, the company said.

In 2019, Meta and Luxottica inked a deal for Ray-Ban Meta branded smart glasses. Most recently, Luxottica’s Oakley brand has joined the partnership, with the debut in June of the Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses. The companies are also working on a version of the smart glasses to be released under the Prada brand, CNBC reported in June.

Luxottica, which also oversees several popular brands like Vogue Eyewear and Persol, has been heavily pushing internet-connected glasses that work with Meta’s AI-powered digital assistant. The technology allows users to play music, take photos and perform other actions similar to how they would use smartphones.

“We believe that glasses will be the future,” Grassi said, adding that the wearables business is profitable. “Glasses will materially replace most of the functionality that today we have embedded into our phones.”

Grassi’s statement echoes sentiments expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in July that “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”

A couple weeks into the fourth quarter, Grassi said he has “a good degree of optimism” for the period, in part because of the rollout of “all the new products that have been recently presented at the Meta Connect,” which will “all play a role in our fourth-quarter profile.”

At the Connect event in September, Zuckerberg revealed the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which have a small digital display that can be manipulated with an accompanying wristband powered by neural technology.

The company also unveiled new smart glasses, including the $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses and the $379 Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) glasses.

Grassi said that Luxottica’s sales growth in North America in the third quarter had more to do with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses than the effects of tariffs, which led to higher prices for its products.

He said the company will be able to reach the 10 million unit capacity that it had originally planned to hit by the end of 2026 earlier than anticipated.

“The overall ecosystem of wearables is going to bring not only revenue associated with the hardware but also the revenue associated with lenses” and over time from services tied to AI.

EssilorLuxottica shares rose 2.4% on Thursday.

Meta isn’t the only tech giant getting into the burgeoning smart glasses market.

Alphabet announced in May a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker to develop smart glasses powered by Google’s Gemini AI digital assistant, while China’s Alibaba unveiled its smart glasses in July that utilize its Quark AI assistant. Apple and OpenAI are also reportedly developing smart glasses.

WATCH: Arm CEO Rene Haas on new partnership with Meta.

Oracle shares ended Thursday trading up 3% as it called for more business in core categories and confirmed a cloud-computing deal with social media company Meta.

The maker of database software sees $20 billion in artificial intelligence-powered database and AI data platform revenue in the 2030 fiscal year, up from $2.4 billion in fiscal 2025 and $3 billion in fiscal 2026.

“You see the change in these numbers that it’s a little bit easier for us to find supply, not this year or next year, but in subsequent years,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two new CEOs, told analysts Thursday at the company’s AI World conference in Las Vegas. “So as we’re able to find that supply, customers contract for it, we see immense demand, and then we go about delivering that to customers.”

Magouyrk said that in 30 days during the current quarter, Oracle contracted $65 billion in new cloud infrastructure commitments.

“It was across seven different contracts from four different customers,” Magouyrk said. “None of those customers are OpenAI. I know some people are questioning sometimes, ‘Hey, is it just OpenAI? The reality is, we think OpenAI is a great customer, but we have many customers.”

Meta which operates Facebook and Insatgram is one of the four customers, he said. Bloomberg reported in September that the two companies were discussing a $20 billion deal.

The deal with Meta comes amid a flurry of spending by tech companies to invest in the infrastructure for their AI initiatives. Meta in July said that it expects to spend between $66 billion and $72 billion this year in capital expenditures.

In recent years, Oracle has expanded its cloud infrastructure division that competes with the likes of Amazon and Google. At the same time, Oracle has started offering its database in clouds other than its own.

Oracle secured a commitment from OpenAI in excess of $300 billion in July.

AI infrastructure has an adjusted gross margin of 30% to 40% after land, data center, power and computing equipment costs, Oracle said. Earlier this month, The Information reported that Oracle saw a 14% gross margin on renting out Nvidia AI chips in the August quarter.

“I’ve read a lot of stories that are speculating that Oracle is chasing revenue for revenue’s sake, but let’s be crystal clear,” said Doug Kehring, the company’s principal financial officer. “We only pursue opportunities where we have a clear line of sight to attractive market margins that reward us for intellectual property and the activity we bring to customers.”

After market close, Oracle said it’s now targeting $21 in adjusted earnings per share on $225 billion in revenue for fiscal 2030, representing a 31% compound annual growth rate. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $18.92 per share on $198.39 billion in revenue. The stock slipped 2% in extended trading.

WATCH: Oracle kicks off its analyst day to outline deliverables and margin profile