Salesforce says Bret Taylor will step down as vice chair and co-CEO on January 31, 2023, and Marc Benioff will stay on as chair and CEO
- Observers viewed Bret Taylor as a possible successor for Marc Benioff, Salesforce's iconic co-founder. — It's the second time in less than three years …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bret Taylor's rise at Salesforce was unusually fast: promoted to president and COO in late 2019 (from his product chief role), he told people close to him by October 2021 that he expected to be promoted to CEO soon, and got the vice chair and co-CEO title weeks later (alongside Marc Benioff). But the structure always looked asymmetric — within a day of the co-CEO announcement, Benioff said internally that Taylor would still report to him (via an internal Slack message).
The departure closes that loop. Reporting since the announcement describes months of growing tension over how Taylor spent his time, and observers had viewed him as the leading candidate to succeed Salesforce's iconic co-founder. With him gone, the succession question reopens from scratch.
First-order effects
- Marc Benioff reverts to sole chair and CEO, dissolving the dual-leadership structure created just over a year earlier, while Miguel Milano is elevated to COO and Robin Washington keeps her combined operating-and-finance title.
Second-order effects
- The board loses its apparent internal successor, forcing Salesforce to rebuild a bench around Milano and Washington rather than a single heir apparent — and inviting outside scrutiny of whether any deputy can hold real authority under a founder-CEO.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, co-CEO appointments at founder-led companies function less as shared governance than as extended auditions — and when the audition strains, founders consolidate control, leaving boards to restart succession planning without a designated heir.
The trend: Dual-CEO experiments at large software companies are collapsing back into sole founder leadership, pushing succession questions further out rather than resolving them.