If you work in sales, marketing, or customer service, odds are, you know Salesforce (CRM). The enterprise software company provides customer relationship management (CRM) tools that are used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
But Salesforce didn’t become a success overnight. Co-founded in 1999 by CEO Marc Benioff, the company has investors to thank for helping it transform from a tiny startup into a mega-cap stock with a market capitalization of $185 billion as of spring 2026.
In fact, Salesforce served as an emblem of the modern digital economy when it replaced ExxonMobil (XOM) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2020.
But as the AI revolution continues to reshape business, Salesforce has faced headwinds, and its shares fell 25% in 2025 due to weaker-than-expected revenue forecasts and slowing growth.
In 2026, Salesforce announced a massive $50 billion share buyback program, a move designed to reduce the company’s share count and benefit shareholders.
Salesforce even noted in a press release that its buyback “underscores leadership’s confidence in the company’s position in the Agentic Era and commitment to driving shareholder value.”
So, just who are its shareholders?
Who owns Salesforce?
Unlike privately held companies, no single person owns Salesforce.
Instead, Salesforce is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. It is also a prominent component of the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
This means that Salesforce’s ownership is spread across institutional investors, individual shareholders, and company leadership.
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Salesforce’s institutional investors (85%)
Institutional players are Salesforce’s dominant owners. They control roughly 85% of shares outstanding.
This is because Salesforce is a major component of the S&P 500, and so it’s automatically included in index funds that track the index, such as Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VOO), and iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV).
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According to Yahoo! Finance, over 3,000 institutional entities owned CRM as of December 31, 2025, and half of its shares were controlled by just 24 companies.
Here are Salesforce’s Top 10 institutional investors:
Salesforce’s biggest shareholders
Vanguard Group Inc.
89.84 million
9.73%
$17,754,348,146
Blackrock Inc.
80.69 million
8.74%
$15,944,709,077
State Street Corporation
50.08 million
5.43%
$9,896,599,577
Capital International Investors
22.72 million
2.46%
$4,490,010,089
Geode Capital Management, LLC
21.78 million
2.36%
$4,304,557,596
Capital World Investors
19.67 million
2.13%
$3,887,615,455
Morgan Stanley
19.01 million
2.06%
$3,756,490,460
NORGES BANK
12.02 million
1.30%
$2,374,386,087
Northern Trust Corporation
10.5 million
1.14%
$2,075,277,955
FMR, LLC
10.25 million
1.11%
$2,025,692,820
Source: Yahoo! Finance
Salesforce’s individual investors (16%)
Retail investors, or members of the general public who buy and sell stocks, own hundreds of millions of shares of CRM, making up around 16% of Salesforce’s ownership.
Company histories:
While they are a significant group, in terms of shareholder voting power, individual investors don’t have nearly the same power in making major company decisions as its institutional investors do.
20 years ago, March 8 1999 Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, & I showed up at 1449 Montgomery Street & started a company called https://t.co/GcJjXaxGXz & introduced the end of software (now called the the cloud). Congratulations @parkerharris on 20 amazing years! pic.twitter.com/FQdjNbZI0D
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 8, 2019
Who is Salesforce’s leadership? What is their stake in the company?
Salesforce CEO Benioff owns 2.3% of total shares outstanding, or 11.9 million shares.
In 1999, Benioff left his job as Vice President at Oracle to found Salesforce, along with his colleagues Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. They built the prototype for their CRM software out of a rented apartment on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill.
Like many other Silicon Valley companies, Salesforce followed the traditional trajectory of growth: going from startup to earning press, increasing revenues, securing angel investments (from none other than Oracle’s Larry Ellison), and going public in December 2004.
By 2008, Salesforce had 1 million customers and $1 billion in revenues.
Harris and Moellenhoff continue to own a smaller, albeit sizable, number of shares: 1.9 million and 2.2 million, respectively, while SEC filings from Dominguez are not readily available.
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