Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff turned his earnings call into a vodcast. Why other Fortune 500 CEOs might follow

All the world’s a stage. Now that’s even true of the usually dull quarterly earnings call.

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In February, Salesforce founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff turned his routine fourth-quarter earnings call into an influencer-style production. Clad in a black leather jacket and seated high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Benioff streamed his financial updates like a podcaster, complete with a broadcast-quality microphone, a YouTube livestream, and interviews with special guests, including customers of the cloud-software company such as SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts CEO Geoff Ballotti.

“We’re so thrilled to be here with everybody,” Benioff said, seated at a conference table with his colleagues. “It is a gorgeous day, 70 degrees, the AI capital of the world, and we’re coming here to you live.”

Before diving into the numbers, Benioff also made a brief live appearance on TBPN, the daily live podcast about tech that was recently acquired by OpenAI, to tout record revenues and downplay fears of a “SaaSpocalypse,” the selloff that had clobbered the market value of a slew of software companies. Afterward, Salesforce’s social media team sliced the show into a short clip for LinkedIn, extending what used to be a dry, hour-long phone call into snackable content.

“Marc challenged us to try something new and speak to a bigger audience,” Patrick Stokes, president and chief marketing officer at Salesforce, tells Fortune via email, adding that the team wanted to bring some of the “vibe and energy” of its massive annual Dreamforce conference to a standard financial update. The software giant says it plans to use the format again for its first-quarter fiscal year 2027 call in May.

Salesforce’s revamped earnings format comes as companies and boards are increasingly pushing CEOs to be more active on social media. Research from Weber Shandwick found that 81% of executives believe a visible public CEO profile is essential to a company’s reputation, and more than half say it helps attract and retain top talent.

Dreaded by some, dodged by others, and abolished by at least one executive entirely, quarterly earnings calls remain must-listen rituals for Wall Street and the business press, but not for most consumers or even rank‑and‑file employees. Yet as CEOs search for ways to control their own narrative in an era of always-on social media and pressure from artificial intelligence, the once‑stodgy earnings call is morphing into a new kind of corporate performance designed to be watched, clipped, and shared.

An audience-focused space

For decades, the traditional earnings call was a primarily audio-only ritual for Wall Street insiders and reporters, and a box to check off for regulators. Now the same script is being repackaged for employees, customers, and casual scrollers, turning earnings day into another stage for the CEO’s reach.

Benioff’s production was a flashier spin on a format other companies have been building for years. Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere livestreamed earnings calls alongside a panel of executives, all sitting in front of the company’s signature hot-pink branding and decked out in company gear. Palantir has also long used its quarterly YouTube livestreams as a stage for CEO Alex Karp’s unscripted monologues—usually delivered in a casual T-shirt against a plain backdrop—but his wide-ranging reflections are what have turned earnings day into must-watch content for the company’s fervent retail investor base. They consistently rack up tens of thousands of views on YouTube.

“I think Palantir has changed the view of other tech companies [and] how they do calls,” says Dan Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities, adding that he expects more companies to follow. “It’s becoming incrementally more important around messaging and the platform and the investor base to not just be some cookie-cutter earnings call where half the people could fall asleep.” He notes the format isn’t a fit for every company or executive, but overall he views the shift as a positive, citing an improved flow of information to investors: “Transparency being improved is better for the stock over time, if companies execute.”

Increasingly, the day a company reports its earnings is also the day its CEO drops a selfie‑style video or LinkedIn essay translating the results for employees and customers. In February, Walmart CEO John Furner shared a short social media video addressed not to analysts but to “associates,” thanking them for serving customers “with speed and excellence around the world.” Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky used a similar move following a strong fourth quarter, telling his more than 280,000 LinkedIn followers that Airbnb had a strong quarter, but “the bigger story isn’t the quarter, it’s the momentum,” before walking through hiring, product, and brand decisions.

Benioff is not yet going viral for his Salesforce earning calls: Indeed, for all the glitz, the audie