Ilana Glazer, Kumail Nanjiani cancel performances for Salesforce as CEO embraces Trump

Benioff came under fire after echoing Trump’s call to deploy the National Guard in San Francisco. (Benioff reportedly moved away from the city during the pandemic, and currently resides in Hawaii.) This sentiment has been rebuked by local officials and his own longtime friend Ron Conway, who resigned from the Salesforce Foundation board over the matter. “It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway, an influential venture capitalist and Democratic donor, wrote to Benioff in his resignation (via the SF Chronicle). Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Benioff pitched U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a partnership with Salesforce. His ideas included ways to rapidly hire 10,000 new agents and enhance deportations with Salesforce AI tech.

Neither Nanjiani nor Glazer have commented on dropping out of the conference. They were replaced by Saturday Night Live alum David Spade. Last year, the conference was headlined by John Mulaney, who observed that “the fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more” and thanked them “for the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”

“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” Mulaney said. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”