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This year did<\/span> not start off great for Salesforce, with an unusual level of turbulence and uncertainty <\/a>surrounding the company. But as the year comes to a close, Salesforce finds itself in surprisingly good shape financially: Its stock is up over 96% year-to-date. Earlier this year, such an outcome would have seemed impossible to imagine.<\/p>\n The bad news started rolling in even before the new year began, when co-CEO Bret Taylor, who many speculated was being groomed to be heir apparent to Marc Benioff, quite suddenly announced he was leaving the company<\/a> at the end of November. A week later, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield announced he, too, was stepping down<\/a>. Losing two key executives in less than a week would be a huge hit to any company, but it would be just the start of an onslaught of bad news for the CRM giant.<\/p>\n As the year began, we learned that activist investors<\/a> were, well, quite active inside the company. This included Elliott Management, Starboard Value, ValueAct Capital, Inclusive Capital and Third Point. When activists show up, they usually have a strong opinion on how to \u201cfix\u201d a company, and this would be no different.<\/p>\n First, we learned that Salesforce was bringing in three new board members<\/a>, which felt like a way to appease the activists \u2014 especially because one of them was Mason Morfit, CEO and chief investment officer of ValueAct, one of those very same activists.<\/p>\n Activists typically pressure the company to cut costs, and in corporate terms, that usually means cutting staff. Sure enough, Salesforce soon announced that it was cutting 10%<\/a> of its workforce, or 7,000 people, on January 4, 2023. The excuse was that it had overhired during the pandemic and this was a correction, but it could also have been throwing the activists a cost-cutting bone.<\/p>\n Either way, reports suggested the company didn\u2019t handle the layoffs <\/a>well, engineers were being pressured<\/a>, and Benioff began preaching about going back to the office<\/a> after embracing work from home, and what Salesforce called the \u201cDigital HQ<\/a>,\u201d during the pandemic. The company\u2019s reputation as a progressive, employee-friendly organization took a big hit<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n