It's not possible to predict if this is a good call or not. At the end of the day, it will come out in the wash, and you can make a pretty penny betting correctly.

I'm going to assume no one here thinks this decision is so foolish that it will single handedly bring about the fall of Salesforce.

As soon as you stray into the land of "we should make this decision on Salesforce's behalf", you're straying into a "known-unknown", and acting as if it's obvious what the correct decision is is always the downfall of those who seek to plan society according to their morality.

If you said "I accept that I don't know if this was a good move for generating profit or not, but I still don't think it should be allowed", I might be more inclined to entertain the idea!

You are having a straw man argument I think. I said it merits a discussion and seems highly unethical. I have to disagree that there are appropriate situations where society should allow unethical situations to occur, unless they are extremely necessary, as that creates an unethical society which is dystopian. My way of phrasing that is that society should highly disincentivize unethical situations.

If it turns out that his being a spokesman provides enough sales to employ 1000 people would that also be unethical?

I have no insider knowledge of the inner working of salesforce but I can reasonably surmise that they aren’t paying him to literally sit around.

No that would be great but I think it’s very difficult to quantify, in an objective way, how much value a spokesperson or CEO brings. That’s the real head scratcher.

Maybe they can employ people to track metrics to determine the effectiveness of sales campaigns and CEO?

This was my entire point - it's actually exceptionally easy to quantify, in an objective way. CRM stock price! If the distributed decision making system that is the market decides this was or was not worth it, based on all available information, then we will know!

You can wax philosophical all day, but nobody is mentioning the downfall of Salesforce.

People aren’t arguing against the merit of advertising. The argument is against the specific case of a massive, already well-recognized and widely-integrated SaaS company paying a specific actor 10 million, while doing layoffs, and the benefit that actor brings versus those laid off.

If Salesforce just started, maybe the name recognition would make sense. My personal belief is that the company is too big already for it to matter. I also don’t think middle-aged CEO’s understand marketing as well as they think: every A-list celebrity advertising campaign I can think of has, from the outside looking in, appeared to go poorly (eg Coinbase).

Either you're wrong, or you're a marketing genius who's perspective and ideas can change the industry. If it's the former, a lot of highly paid people aren't idiots. If it's the latter, you should probably go out there and change the world!