Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has become the latest tech billionaire to buy up a legacy media company, and has picked up Time magazine.
The Meredith Corporation announced the sale to Mr Benioff on Monday, and the reported sale price was for £144m ($190 million).
Mr Benioff now joins the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in owning legacy media publications. Mr Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, and the newspaper has apparently thrived in the years since then.
The news was met with praise and messages of hope from former employees of the magazine, some of whom likened Mr Benioff to the magazine’s legendary founder Henry Luce.
“It’s a dream deal. He’s willing to invest in great journalism,” Alan Murray, the chief content officer at the former Time Inc, toldVanity Fair.
“Those of us in the Time diaspora could not have hoped for a better outcome,” John Huey, a former editor in chief at Time Inc, told that magazine of the sale. “Time has been suffering under something resembling the private-equity model — starvation — for quite a while now, and that won’t work. What’s been needed is someone with genuine entrepreneurial chops and the capital to back it up. The Bezos model, if you will”.
Mr Benioff — who is the co-CEO of a cloud based computing company — began talks with Meredith Corporation over Time around Labour Day, and the process reportedly moved quickly from there.
He had originally intended to buy Fortune — which was owned by the same parent company as the Time title — but that deal was complicated by the fact that the magazine regularly covers Mr Benioff and Salesforce.
