Enterprise

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: The economy is 'ripping'

Key Points
  • The Salesforce CEO pointed to low unemployment in San Francisco, as well as Salesforce's revenue growth.
  • Benioff suggested that U.S. tax reform has brought about more corporate investment.
Marc Benioff, CEO of SalesForce at DreamForce in San Francisco on Sept. 25th, 2018.
CNBC

President Donald Trump isn't the only one who thinks the economy is doing well. Marc Benioff does, too.

Benioff's company, Salesforce, has posted faster stock growth than Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq, alongside other cloud-oriented companies like Adobe, Amazon and Microsoft. The Salesforce performance comes after beating analysts' expectations for every one of the past four quarters.

Indeed, Benioff connects the company's results with the economy in general.

"The economy is ripping. It is still ripping," Benioff told Jim Cramer on CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Tuesday.

"You saw the numbers, these huge growth numbers We said it first. Why did Salesforce just deliver another 27 percent growth quarter at our size? ... Why is that? Because [there is] incredible demand from customers to rebuild their systems."

Salesforce CEO: The economy is ripping
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Salesforce CEO: The economy is ripping

Salesforce's own customers are benefiting from changes that have come about as a result of recently enacted U.S. tax reform, Benioff said.

"They're benefiting from huge economies that are growing at rates they've never seen before," he said.

Benioff said hundreds of CEOs have told him they are investing more because of confidence stemming from the tax breaks.

Benioff also cited the low unemployment rate in San Francisco, where Salesforce is based. Across the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan statistical area unemployment was at 2.8 percent in July, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national unemployment rate in that period was 3.9 percent, according to the federal agency.