Marc Benioff has an estimated net worth of $3.8 billion as of May 2015 according to Forbes. He is #554 in Forbes Billionaires List, #194 in the United States, and #218 in Forbes 400 List as of 2012. He has earned as the founder and chairman of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company. In March 1999, he started the company n a rented San Francisco apartment and has defined its mission as “The End of Software.” He is “credited with turning the software industry on its head” by using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” He is the creator of the term “platform as a service.” It has extended the company’s reach by allowing customers to build their own applications on the company’s architecture or in its cloud.
Born Marc Russell Benioff on September 25, 1964 in San Francisco, California, he was raised in a Jewish family. In 1982, he graduated from Burlingame High School. In 1986, he received a BS in Business Administration from the University of Southern California where he was a member in the TKE social fraternity. Before salesforce.com, he worked for 13 years at Oracle Corporation in various executive positions in sales, marketing, and product development. He was named Oracle’s Rookie of the Year at 23. Three years later, he was promoted to vice president and he was the company’s youngest person to hold the title. Before working at Oracle, he worked as an assembly language programmer at the Macintosh Division of Apple Computer where he was inspired by the company and its co-founder Steve Jobs.