The Oscar for best supporting actor in the OpenAI drama goes to Marc Benioff.

It was Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, who out of the blue offered to hire any and all of the OpenAI employees who wanted to bolt because CEO Sam Altman had been fired.

Benioff posted this tweet at 3:16 pm EST on Nov 20. 

“Salesforce will match any OpenAl researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted Al research team under Silvio Savarese. Send me your CV directly to ceo@salesforce.com. Einstein is the most successful enterprise Al Platform completing 1 Trillion predictive & generative transactions this week! Join our Trusted Al Enterprise Revolution.”

The issue became moot when OpenAI announced Altman would be returning to the company and the board that fired him would be restructured.

It’s doubtful Benioff seriously expected many engineers to jump to Salesforce. 

But it would be a mistake to think the post was a waste of time. 

It garnered more than 8.2 million views. 

It alerted anyone who didn’t know – which is a lot of people – that Salesforce has its own AI research efforts. He claimed it’s the most successful enterprise AI Platform. 

And it spawned a sea of media coverage that you cannot buy. 

Articles appeared everywhere from Business Insider to Benzinga to Forbes to Fortune to Bloomberg to the Hindustan Times. 

We see this kind of “earned” marketing with consumer brands jump on news events. Oreo famously posted the tweet “You can still dunk in the dark” after the lights went out during Super Bowl XLVII.

My favorite part was how Benioff encourages resumes be sent to ceo@salesforce.com.

And how he followed up in the comments after one post told him to “give it up,” saying the staff was “just not going to work for Salesforce. Ever.” 

Benioff responded: “Many of these folks worked for us. Our AI history is very strong. They can boomerang.”