Salesforce's Equality Programs and the 2023 Layoffs: Reading the Earnings Calls
Salesforce committed billions to equality and sustainability programs between 2020 and 2022. In 2023 it laid off 10% of its workforce. What Benioff said on earnings calls and what the proxy statements show.
In January 2023, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced the company would lay off approximately 10% of its global workforce — roughly 7,000 people. The layoffs came after Salesforce had spent two years telling investors, employees, and the public that it had found a way to do well financially while doing good socially. The company’s Equality Report, published annually, tracked progress on pay equity audits, representation, and inclusive hiring. The proxy statement shows executive compensation increased in the same fiscal year as the layoffs. The earnings calls show Benioff acknowledging that the company had overhired. What the Equality Report does not show is what happened to the equality programs when the company needed to cut costs.
Key Findings
- Salesforce laid off approximately 7,000 employees in January 2023, representing ~10% of its global workforce
- The layoffs followed three years of aggressive hiring during which Salesforce’s workforce grew from approximately 35,000 (FY2020) to 73,000 (FY2023)
- Salesforce published annual Equality Reports from 2015 onward, tracking pay equity audits, representation metrics, and DEI program investment
- CEO Marc Benioff’s total compensation was $27.2 million in FY2023, the layoff year, per the proxy statement
- Salesforce’s Equality Report did not quantify total investment in DEI programs in dollar terms, making it impossible to directly compare the scale of DEI investment to the scale of the workforce reduction
What Salesforce Said
Marc Benioff built Salesforce’s public identity around what he called “stakeholder capitalism” — the idea that companies should serve all stakeholders (employees, customers, communities, shareholders) rather than optimizing primarily for shareholder returns. His 2019 book “Trailblazer” laid out this philosophy explicitly.
In practice, Salesforce’s stakeholder commitments took specific, measurable forms. The company ran annual pay equity audits and claimed to spend approximately $10 million per year to close gaps identified in those audits. It published representation data. It had explicit hiring commitments for underrepresented groups. It signed the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement abandoning shareholder primacy.
On the January 2023 earnings call announcing the layoffs, Benioff said: “We hired too many people during the pandemic. It’s not right. We have to make these difficult decisions.”
What Benioff did not say: how the layoff decisions intersected with the company’s DEI commitments, whether the pay equity audits had been or would be run on the reduced workforce, or how the reduction in workforce affected the representation numbers that had been reported in Equality Reports.
The Proxy Statement
The FY2023 proxy statement (the fiscal year ending January 31, 2023 — the year the layoffs were announced) shows executive compensation:
- Marc Benioff: $27.2 million total compensation
- Co-CEO Bret Taylor (departed December 2022): $26.5 million in the fiscal year through his departure
- Other named executive officers: compensation in the range of $14-20 million each
The company’s total named executive officer compensation in the layoff year exceeded $100 million.
Salesforce’s proxy statement also shows the company spent approximately $22.6 billion on stock-based compensation across its workforce in FY2023 — compensation that primarily benefited employees who survived the layoffs and executives who held large equity positions.
The Equality Report Gap
Salesforce’s Equality Report is well-produced and detailed relative to industry norms. It tracks pay equity audit results, representation by gender and race at different levels of the organization, and voluntary employee survey data on belonging and inclusion.
What the Equality Report does not track: the total dollar investment in DEI programs, the cost of DEI staff and initiatives, or what happens to equality metrics following workforce reductions. The FY2023 report, published after the layoffs, does not include any analysis of how the 7,000-person workforce reduction affected representation metrics.
This is not a legal obligation. Companies are not required to analyze how layoffs affect their DEI commitments. But a company whose CEO described himself as a leader of the stakeholder capitalism movement, and whose annual report framed equality as a core business value, might be expected to address the question.
The Pattern
Salesforce is not unusual. The 2023 tech layoff cycle hit companies with extensive DEI programs at roughly the same rate as companies without them. Meta (10,000 layoffs in November 2022), Google (12,000 in January 2023), Amazon (18,000 in January 2023) — all companies with significant DEI programs and infrastructure — cut their workforces substantially in the same window.
In each case, the DEI reporting continued. The equality commitments remained stated policy. The workers who lost jobs were not categorized by their DEI status in public reporting.
The honest read: for companies that adopted extensive DEI programs during the 2020-2022 hiring boom, those programs were a feature of abundance. When the economic environment changed, DEI programs did not protect employees any more than any other corporate initiative protected them. The commitments to stakeholder value did not prevent the stakeholder workforce from being reduced.
Marc Benioff acknowledged on an earnings call that hiring too many people was a mistake. He has not publicly addressed whether his company’s stakeholder capitalism framework should have produced a different decision. That would be the accountability check the framework implies.
Sources
- Salesforce January 4, 2023 layoff announcement — press.salesforce.com (verified 2026-05-08)
- Salesforce FY2023 Q4 Earnings Call Transcript — investor.salesforce.com (verified 2026-05-08)
- Salesforce FY2023 Proxy Statement — SEC EDGAR (CIK: CRM) (verified 2026-05-08)
- Salesforce FY2023 Equality Report — salesforce.com/company/equality (verified 2026-05-08)
- Business Roundtable, “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” August 19, 2019 — businessroundtable.org (verified 2026-05-08)