Elliott Named Its Own Slate of Salesforce Board Candidates

Elliott Management, one of five activist investors working at Salesforce, has named a slate of candidates to the Salesforce board. This decision, which has been confirmed by TechCrunch sources, is an indication that negotiations to resolve this issue without coming to this point have failed. CNBC was the first to report this news.

“Elliott has had a constructive but intense dialogue with the company over the past few weeks and has appointed a slate of directors to the Salesforce board,” a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The person indicated that Elliott has exerted maximum pressure on the company through dialogue and through these appointments and that the company will be watching closely tonight when Salesforce releases its results later today.

“And we’ll see what happens basically, if and when they’ve announced things that Elliott wants to hear tonight, just improvements to the business and changes overall. And after the results are released, that’s when the company will determine the next steps.

When a company nominates its own slate of board candidates, the end goal is to have a group of people on the board who can act on Elliott’s behalf and implement the changes they have in mind. They haven’t been clear on what they want, but it clearly involves cutting operating costs and increasing profits, or even divesting some of the non-core parts of the business.

So far, the company has laid off 10% of its workforce and announced other changes, such as reducing its real estate footprint in a bid to cut costs.

Elliott, who announced he was taking a multi-billion stake in the company in January, is not the only activist currently working at the company. Starboard Value, ValueAct, Inclusive Capital and Third Point, which got involved last month, are also high profile activists investing in Salesforce. Having five activists operating at the same time in a company like Salesforce is very unusual and possibly the first time this has happened before.

Salesforce had no comment on the news. He publishes his results this afternoon after the bell.