Benioff has trotted out some of these sound bites before, but the line “capitalism, as we know it, is dead" is not something you’d expect to hear from the Salesforce CEO.

There’s generally not much actual news made at publication-based tech conferences, and that’s probably by design; CEOs get prime speaker panel spots, get lobbed softball questions, and generally give a completely myopic assessment of their company and industry at large. This was not quite the case at a Thursday night TechCrunch event featuring Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who said “capitalism, as we know it, is dead, " and referred to Facebook as “the new cigarettes.”

“I really strongly believe that capitalism as we know it is dead,” Benioff said last Thursday night. “We’re going to see a new kind of capitalism and that new kind of capitalism that’s going to emerge is not the Milton Friedman capitalism that’s just about making money.”

He also burned Facebook, saying the social media site is “the new cigarettes.”

Admittedly, Benioff has been peddling this “Facebook is the new cigarettes” line for more than a year now. Here's a CNN video where he used the same line on October 3, 2018, saying, “Facebook is the new cigarettes. It’s not good you for, it’s addictive, you don’t know who’s trying to convince you to use it or misuse it.”

But since then, Facebook has received massive fines for mishandling personal data, further obsequiously sucked up to Trump, and initiated yet another half-baked cryptocurrency concept.

“We need a  national privacy law,” Benioff continued. “Otherwise you’re going to get a patchwork of privacy laws. We have to get our privacy and data locked down so we know where we’re  going. [Regulators] need to be stepping in now and they should be working hard to make those changes.”

The full 22-minute Marc Benioff conversation is available at TechCrunch.

Related: Marc and Lynne Benioff Give Major Donation To Gut Biome Research [SFist]

Image: TechCrunch via Flickr