Marc Benioff Has Torched His Do-Good CEO Image: Beth Kowitt

Marc Benioff, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Salesforce Inc., has spent north of $1 billion and decades trying to convince the public that he is the good kind of tech titan and that his enterprise software firm is the good kind of tech company.

So Benioff’s media blowup last week wasn’t just a little PR oopsie. It was a full-on torching of the carefully constructed narrative he’s spent so many years creating.

In an interview with The New York Times that should have been a benign, even boring, preview to the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, Benioff ...