Marc Benioff

The Voyage

Marc Benioff is not a yacht owner — he is something rarer in the technology elite: an ocean philanthropist with no commercial interest in the sea whatsoever. In 2016 he and his wife Lynne founded the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, a research centre dedicated to applying science to ocean problems where the solutions are within reach: ship-strike avoidance for whales, plastic mitigation, kelp-forest restoration, ghost-net retrieval. In 2022 the Benioffs committed an additional $60 million to scale BOSL into a global initiative coordinating ocean scientists across UCSB, the University of Hawaii and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

The Stewardship

Beyond BOSL, Benioff has been one of the most visible corporate voices on ocean health. He co-founded Friends of the Ocean (with Marco Lambertini of WWF) and used his Davos platforms repeatedly to put ocean health on the climate agenda. Salesforce committed to a trillion-tree initiative through 1t.org, much of it with marine ecosystem implications. Benioff's framing — that the ocean is the largest carbon sink on the planet and is treated like an afterthought — has become standard language in climate-tech finance.

The Vessels

Benioff does not own a yacht. He is included here because he is a leading public voice from Silicon Valley framing the ocean as a planetary system rather than a backdrop — and because most of the buyers Wind Voyage talks to know him personally or by reputation.

Why this voice on Wind Voyage

Benioff's bet is that the next generation of philanthropists will measure their impact in ocean health, not in art collections. A Wind Voyage 110 is, among other things, a vessel that lets the owner take that bet seriously — a science-platform that happens to also be a family yacht.