For more than two decades, Marc Benioff has towered over Silicon Valley politics as an iconic statesman-C.E.O., personifying a new model for compassionate-and-issues-based mega-capitalists who viewed their corporation as not merely commercial organisms but vessels for political combat. Over the years, Benioff has been eager to wade into policy battles in places like Indiana (LGBT discrimination) and Texas (abortion restrictions) that have nothing to do with Salesforce’s cloud-computing business but are part of his personal moral crusade.

Back in San Francisco, Benioff bent the ear of the city’s leaders and became an unofficial spokesman for its business elite, all the while dousing local institutions with a fusion of personal and corporate philanthropy. (The lines could be blurry.) Meanwhile, far from home, he relished his role as a familiar denizen of CNBC sets and Davos chalets, becoming one of the most outspoken voices for a rejiggered capitalism and, without a doubt, basking in the public mahalo that came with it. Benioff was the architect of the corporate zeitgeist’s modern form of social activism.