Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff rules out a full return to work, says the pandemic will linger, and urges climate action in a new interview. Here are the 8 best quotes.

Marc Benioff.

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff expects a permanent shift to remote work for some employees.
• The billionaire executive warned of more COVID-19 variants and touted vaccines and testing.
• Benioff also underscored the urgent need to address the climate crisis.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff predicted a permanent shift to remote work, warned the pandemic will continue indefinitely, and underlined the importance of vaccines and testing in a Yahoo Finance interview this week.

The billionaire owner of Time magazine also trumpeted Roblox, urged executives to cultivate equality and sustainability at their companies, and called for greater measures to combat the climate crisis.

Here are Benioff's eight best quotes from the interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:

1. "We're not all coming back. About 15% of employees worldwide have come back to the office. Right now a lot of people are working and succeeding at home. They wanna continue to work at home, and that should be just all right with CEOs if their employees are productive."

2. "I started Salesforce in an apartment in San Francisco. Today, I would start it on Slack and that is because my digital space is more important than my physical space. I need to bring everyone together."

3. "Vaccines are extremely important. For our Salesforce employees, if they wanna come back in the office, they have to be vaccinated. Testing is also a critical part of making all of this work."

4. "Roblox is a vision for the future of digital interactions. You're creating custom worlds, you're creating custom applications, but they're all built on a consistent metaverse platform."

5. "In this new world, if you're not cultivating a beginner's mind as a CEO, you're making a mistake. It's one of the reasons why we paid $27 billion for Slack - because we knew every company was gonna have to have a digital HQ. It was a must-have, not a want."

6. "We're in a pandemic world. This is a forever virus. We're only on the Delta variant - that's only the fourth Greek letter. There's more Greek letters to come, there's more variants to come."

7. "CEOs need to be focused on their culture, their values, what is really important to them. Where is trust, where is safety, where are you with equality, where are you with sustainability? These are the core values of a corporation today."

8. "We cannot run companies the way they are. Have you noticed the world is on fire? There's fires everywhere, we're in a sustainability crisis. We need to sequester 100 gigatons of carbon, we need to energize an ecopreneur revolution, we need to accelerate the Fortune 500 to net zero, and we need to plant a trillion trees."

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