Activist investor Elliott takes stake in Slack owner Salesforce

The US activist investor firm Elliott Investment Management has taken a multibillion-dollar stake in Salesforce, the business software company that owns the Slack messaging platform.

In 2012, a dispute with Argentina over sovereign debt owned by Elliott led to the temporary impounding of an Argentinian naval ship in Ghana. Elliott also buys businesses and is the owner of the UK bookshop chain Waterstones.

Salesforce has been contacted for comment. Benioff co-founded the company and will be the sole boss when his fellow chief executive, Bret Taylor, leaves at the end of this month.

Benioff announced this month that Salesforce would be making 8,000 roles redundant, affecting about 10% of its workforce. In a message to staff, he blamed himself for expanding the company too rapidly during the coronavirus pandemic, amid surging demand for tech products and services as millions of people worked from home around the world. Salesforce employs nearly 80,000 people as of last October, compared with 49,000 at the beginning of 2020.

The big US tech firms have made a series of redundancy announcements in recent months with Alphabet, the owner of Google, the latest to reveal job cutting plans, saying on Friday that it would reduce its worldwide workforce by 12,000 people.

Elliott has made many technology-focused investments. It recently won a board seat at Pinterest, the online pinboard business, when the company added the Elliott portfolio manager Marc Steinberg as a director.

Elliott has been approached for comment.