Billionaire Owner of TIME Tells Trump ‘We Look Forward To Working Together’ After Magazine Makes Him Person of the Year
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
TIME magazine owner Marc Benioff congratulated Donald Trump after the publication named the president-elect its Person of the Year on Wednesday. Benioff is the founder of Salesforce and acquired TIME in 2018.
“In some years this is a hard, hard choice,” editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs told MSNBC on Thursday. “This year, not a hard choice… but this was an obvious decision for those of us at TIME.”
Hours later, Benioff tweeted at Trump and said there is “promise” in the country and expressed a willingness to be “working together.”
“Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on being named TIME Person of the Year 2024. This marks a time of great promise for our nation. We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone. May G-d bless the United States of America,” he wrote.
It is unclear whether Benioff was using the royal we as in “I,” or if he actually meant the magazine he owns will seek to cooperate with Trump in some capacity.
During an interview with TIME, Trump answered a variety of questions and at one point appeared to walk back his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries.
“I’d like to bring them down,” Trump said. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
Benioff is not the only billionaire owner of a major news publication to cozy up to Trump. On Thursday, it was reported that Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong nixed an editorial criticizing the president-elect’s cabinet nominations. The intervention came weeks after Soon-Shiong put the kibosh on an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos did the same at his Washington Post.
