Bret Taylor joins Benioff as Salesforce co-CEO during earnings call

Salesforce announced new leadership in its latest earnings call. Going forward, the US tech giant's founder Marc Benioff will share CEO duties with former president and COO Bret Taylor.

Rumour has it that Benioff is preparing to step down from his long-held leadership position, possibly moving to a chairman of the board position as Jeff Bezos did this year. However, he isn't ready to move on yet.

Becoming co-CEO of Salesforce is a big step, but it wasn't Taylor's only promotion this week: the former Facebook CTO (2009-'12) was also named independent chairman of the board at Twitter on Tuesday.

Salesforce has had dual CEOs before: Benioff shared the role with Keith Block from 2018-'20, a fact he was keen to remind analysts of on the earnings call - stressing how well the arrangement had worked. However, the company is evidently also performing well with a single CEO, posting a 27 per cent YoY rise in third quarter revenues to $6.9 billion.

Subscription and support revenues were $6.4 billion, up 25 per cent YoY; while professional services and other revenues were $0.5 billion, up 45 per cent. It's worth noting that the professional services arm is currently operating at a loss: the cost of running it as noted as $509 million on the balance sheet. However, this is more than made up for by subscription revenues, which 'only' consumed $1.3 billion to operate.

With expenses totalling nearly $5 billion - including $1.2 billion spent on R&D - plus other losses, Salesforce's total net income for Q3 reached $468 million, and $1.5 billion for the year-to-date: down 56.7 per cent and 61.3 per cent, respectively.