Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife are buying Time Magazine for $190 million
- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff will buy Time Magazine for $190 million.
- The announcement comes just eight months after Meredith Corp., publisher of several popular print publications, completed its purchase of Time.
- In a note relayed by Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal, Benioff said he and his wife would have "no operational responsibility" for the weekly outlet, and acquired it as an investment.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff will buy Time Magazine for $190 million.
The sale comes just eight months after Meredith Corp., which publishes such titles as People, Better Homes and Gardens, and Entertainment Weekly, completed its purchase of the iconic magazine.
Meredith also listed several other titles, including, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated, though negotiations for those publications continue to drag on, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The sale is expected to close with 30 days, according to the Journal, and the Benioffs are buying the outlet as individuals.
Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal told staff in a letter on Sunday night the Benioffs would be acquiring the iconic magazine "as a family investment."
"It will have no connection to Salesforce, the software company Marc founded in 1999," Felsenthal added. "While they will not be operators of the business, we are extremely fortunate to have Marc and Lynne's guidance and mentorship as we set out to build a new company.
"TIME is a treasure trove of the world's history and culture," Benioff wrote in a note included in Felsenthal's letter. "Lynne and I will take on no operational responsibility for TIME, and look only to be stewards of this historic and iconic brand with all of us."
The transaction shows the growing integration between the tech and media industries.
In 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million, though at the time Bezos had no prior experience in the newspaper business. Since then Bezos has invested in several other digital media outlets.
Similarly, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic, a magazine and multi-platform publisher.
Benioff, the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Salesforce, was ranked number 246 in Bloomberg's Billionaire Index. The 53-year-old's San Francisco-based cloud software provider reported revenue of $10.5 billion last year, according to Bloomberg.