Valleywag: Benioff a petty tyrant

So, finally, the bottom of the story of the Wall Street Journal's clash with web billionaire Marc Benioff. And it gets uglier. Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal reporter who was investigating the Salesforce.com CEO's Hawaii getaway, was indeed detained, both by Benioff's construction crew and the police. Benioff told the police that she was a stalker. The detention may have been illegal. And Journal brass in New York decided to cut mention of the incident when the article about Benioff's Hawaii complex was published.

The Journal, officially, says only that there was a contretemps between Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal reporter working on a color piece on mogul real estate, and a construction crew working on his property. A spokesman for Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, said Pui-Wing was never charged. And Benioff isn't saying anything. But, the accounts of several Journal reporters describe a paranoid tech mogul, a massive over-reaction to an innocent article, and still chilly relations between the Journal and the Salesforce.com CEO.

Benioff's campaign against Pui-Wing began well before the article appeared in May this year. He wrote letters to Dow Jones management, including Karen House, the wife of the outgoing Dow Jones CEO. Benioff hired a crisis PR agency. He flew to New York to berate Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor. And the irony is that it was because of his complaints that the Journal felt obliged to get a first-hand account of the property, sending Pui-Wing to Hawaii, so that they could not be accused of reliance on second-hand information. Benioff brought the visit upon himself.

In Hawaii, Pui-Wing was first taken to a neighboring property by a real estate agent. Later, she returned alone, in order to take more photos. Inadvertently, according to her colleagues, she was on a stretch of road that was on Benioff's land. His construction crew, apparently alerted by Benioff to a possible intruder, detained her. They spoke with Benioff, and then the police.

The detention may have been illegal if, as Pui-Wing claimed, she was trying to leave the property. According to most trespass law, It is usually illegal to arrest a trespasser and hold them on the property until law enforcement arrives as this defeats the purpose of allowing them to cure the trespass by leaving.

After Pui-Wing was released, Benioff wrote another letter, to Paul Steiger, accusing Pui-Wing of stalking, with her incursion onto his property as new evidence. At this point, Steiger abandoned his usually emollient attitude toward complaining CEOs. The Journal wrote back what insiders describe as a fuck-you letter. Benioff told confidantes that he'd hired a private investigator to trail Pui-Wing, but Journal managers were not aware of any such threats.

The Journal shied away from mention of the contretemps in Pui-Wing's May 26 article on Benioff's Hawaii property. The reporter's detention was the juiciest angle to the story, certainly more interesting than a run-of-the-mill report on luxury second homes in Hawaii. The San Francisco bureau chief, Steve Yoder, told Pui-Wing to include a personal note about her detention. But it was deleted, after some debate, by Wall Street Journal management in New York.

It would be easy to conclude that the business newspaper had acted to save one of the Bay Area's most well-connected business figures from embarrassment. But it's probably more likely that they saw Pui-Wing's personal account as self-referential, and ultimately not relevant to the purpose of the item.

And that's an indictment, not of the craven business press, but of a tradition of dry and dispassionate reporting that often misses the big story. In this case, missing the open secret of Marc Benioff: that one of Silicon Valley's most prominent executives is in fact a petty tyrant, puffed up by IPO wealth and nauseatingly fawning profiles that he's grown to believe.

The Benioff story [Valleywag special]

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