A reliable source at Microsoft informs me that this Maybach parked in a handicapped space belongs to Salesforce.com CEO (and supposed student of Eastern religion) Marc Benioff. This happened at the Borg’s Silicon Valley campus where Benioff was attending a TechCrunch roundtable. Photo was snapped and Twittered by someone else at the show. See the original photo here and the Twitter feed here. I’m just taken aback that a humble, modest guy like Marc “Bodhisattva” Benioff would drive a Maybach. Somehow I pictured him in a Prius. Or a Tesla. Or maybe a dozen Teslas, yoked together, just to be extra extra extra good to the planet. But a Maybach? A big old stinky German ubersedan with 600 horsepower and a $400,000 price tag? Who’d have imagined?
Doubly troubling if Benioff is driving the Maybach and not being driven in it. Does he not know what the vehicle is for?
And obviously he tries to outshine old Jobso. He’s driving a bigger, more expensive german car than Jobs, and he parks and therefore blocks two – not one – handicapped spaces!
Anyone got a look if he got licence plates?
The article is incorrect. Posted “this Maybach parked in a handicapped space”.
If you notice correctly, it’s not parked in a spot at all. Instead it’s parked in the ramp to allow handicapped people on and off the curb. Effectively, that’s blocking all the handicapped spots!
Not only that but the car was running the entire time polluting away (I walked up and checked it out). Was Benioff concerned and assumed a quick getaway was in order?
If this is indeed Benioff’s car, he sure is a hypocrite. He recently had a Facebook post that said “Marc thinking (sic) the global recession is slowing down global warming. The worst economic situation is great for the planet. Less growth = less carbon.”
The underpinning of that statement is that people won’t have jobs and therefore won’t have to use their cars to drive to work. What an elitist Benioff is! It is easy enough to say something like that when you’ve grown up rich, are a multi-millionaire, have a home, clothes and food. All the rest of us middle (and upper!) classes will take a whole lot of comfort in Marc’s silly statement and sit around and say “Hey, we don’t have a home and we’re starving but look what we’re doing for the planet!” I have no argument with Benioff’s success and money – he made that happen (well, with a lot of financial help. But his Facebook post illustrates one of the reasons the wealthy (and greedy) got this country into this spot: total lack of empathy for the plight and future of the human beings who live their lives far below the wealthiest 2%.
Isn’t there any sense of decency anymore? Benioff should really keep his hypocritical, elitist views to his buddies at the country club.
Benioff? Isn’t this the same guy who bought a remote Pacific atoll, deployed a stolen nuke there, drove sixty miles away from it in his yacht and ‘sploded the nuke remotely, just for the best all over tan money could buy?
Meanwhile, a team of astrologers, astronomers, archeologists, and Eastern Christian theologians (i.e., people with way too much time on their hands) determined that today is Jesus’s birthday. Put a candle on that cupcake and blow!
I use to work with Marc at Oracle in the early 90′s when he was the walking, talking poster child for the label “egomaniac with a huge inferiority complex.” Back then he in search searching for spiritual enlightenment, taking private classes with Tony Robbins to buff up his “personal power” and generally spending a good part of his day manipulating or berating co-workers, and back-stabbing Oracle colleagues.
10-12 years later and given the success of SFDC (for which he deserves much credit and kudos) I thought perhaps he had changed. The handicap parking episode says it all — he still a brutal, insecure hypocrite who thinks the rules don’t apply to him.
Come on fellas. Maybe his built-in belly-dancers (courtesy of Daimler-Benz) are handicapped (golfingly) and DESERVE a coveted parking spot.
It’s just semantics.
Bigger news is that Obama is looking into “talks with moderate part of Taliban”.
Boy, it will be a bitch to cater for that meeting. Sandwiches for One?
Moderate Talibans are perfect oxymorons.
Which ones are moderate? Those who shave but don’t bathe or those who bathe but don’t shave? Or are we looking into lowest number of grenades and rocket launchers strapped to the belt/back of a Moderate Taliban?
Benioff’s nuke could have been better used to give talibans a perfect tan.