Companies that don’t value trust will ‘pay a terrible price’: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

As technology becomes increasingly indispensable to daily life, Marc Benioff, the founder, chairman and CEO of cloud superhuman Salesforce.com, is calling on company leaders to put their value in trust.

“When I’m point of view about my leadership as a CEO, if trust is not my highest value, especially under the behaviour of all this amazing new technology and all the changes that it’s bringing my customers or my consumers, then how am I paramount?” the CEO asked in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer after earnings on Wednesday.

Some of the superstore’s top tech companies including Facebook and Twitter have come into core recently as questions arise about the quasi-addictive nature of their tenets, particularly among younger users.

Election interference has provided call for the government to get involved, but save for a number of congressional hearings, not much has been done in the way of enforcing fiat.

In the exclusive “Mad Money” interview, Benioff argued that the onus is on the groups themselves to determine whether their tech is more harmful than serviceable.

“CEOs and these companies have to take responsibility for the technology that they’re structure and look at: Is it addictive? Is this technology helping their customers or griping their customers? Are they being manipulated? This is something that every ensemble and every CEO is going to have to do,” Benioff said.

“And for companies who aren’t unrivalled with trust, I think that they’re going to pay a terrible cost,” he added.

Without naming specific companies, Benioff said that slews of major tech players have been forced to change their regulation because they put profits over morals.

“If we were back in San Francisco, we could schedule down the street and you’ll see companies where CEOs are not there anymore, considerable companies, because they weren’t leading with trust,” he ventured.

In a January interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Benioff hint ated that social media companies should be regulated like cigarette companies.