What if you bought Salesforce in 2005?
US Tech · Software. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play65.0× · S&P 500 same money: $5,763
$1,000 in Salesforce at the start of 2005 would be worth about $65,000 today — 65.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Salesforce was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, with a mascot crossed out with the word 'software' and a pitch that companies should rent business applications over the internet rather than install them. It went public in 2004 and became the defining software-as-a-service company, proving that subscription software could reach enormous scale. The shares rose steadily, wobbling only briefly in the 2008 crisis.
Growth was fuelled partly by acquisitions: ExactTarget, MuleSoft, Tableau in 2019 and Slack for close to 28 billion dollars in 2021. Investors eventually tired of buying growth at those prices, and in late 2022 and early 2023 several activist funds took stakes and pushed for margins over expansion. Salesforce cut staff, launched buybacks and started paying a dividend in 2024. Its AI agent platform, Agentforce, was positioned as the next leg, while sceptics worried that AI might shrink demand for per-seat software licences. Holders from 2005 still did very well.
The lesson: Activists tend to arrive when growth slows; Salesforce's shift from acquisitive expansion to margins showed how a company's identity changes once its market matures.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | $4.00 | $65,000 | $5,763 | 65.0× |
| 2007 | $10.00 | $26,000 | $4,789 | 26.0× |
| 2008 | $15.00 | $17,333 | $4,626 | 17.3× |
| 2010 | $18.00 | $14,444 | $6,071 | 14.4× |
| 2012 | $25.00 | $10,400 | $5,312 | 10.4× |
| 2015 | $59.00 | $4,407 | $3,301 | 4.4× |
| 2018 | $102 | $2,549 | $2,519 | 2.5× |
| 2020 | $163 | $1,595 | $2,092 | 1.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2005, turning $1,000 into $65,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,763.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Salesforce is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in US Tech
- What if you bought Apple?
- What if you bought Microsoft?
- What if you bought Amazon?
- What if you bought Nvidia?
- What if you bought Google / Alphabet?
- What if you bought Facebook / Meta?