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Elliott or High Water

Elliott Management has announced a multi-billion dollar position in Salesforce. Should co-C.E.O. Marc Benioff be worried?
Elliott Management has announced a multi-billion dollar position in Salesforce. Should co-C.E.O. Marc Benioff be worried? Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
January 29, 2023

Last week, the biggest news at the crossroads of Wall Street and Silicon Valley was Elliott Management’s announcement of a multi-billion dollar position in Marc Benioff’s Salesforce, Inc. “Salesforce is one of the preeminent software companies in the world, and having followed the company for nearly two decades, we have developed a deep respect for Marc Benioff and what he has built,” Jesse Cohn, the wunderkind activist at Elliott, said in a dose of marvelous understated grin-fucking.

Benioff deserves much of the respect generally lavished upon him, of course, but he should also be worried. Cohn, 43, grew up in Baldwin, Long Island, the son of a lawyer father and an artist mother. He graduated summa cum laude from Wharton in 2002, with a degree in finance, and then headed to Morgan Stanley as an analyst in the firm’s two-year junior banker program. From there, Cohn joined Elliott in 2004 as a research analyst, focused on investing in distressed securities and undervalued technology companies.