Alexander Bittan
Long-Term Frontier-Technology Investor, Neuralink/Anduril/Perplexity
Salesforce at a 52-week low trades like a broken business at about 11x forward earnings, yet it is 95% subscription with 77%-plus gross margins and $72 billion of RPO, up 14%. Marc Benioff has repurchased $27.1 billion, cutting diluted shares 10%, and says AI makes Salesforce stronger and the latest quarter had a record volume of large deals. A roughly 1% Anthropic stake bought for about $330 million is now worth over $8 billion, value the market is giving away free. x.comÂ
Salesforce at under $165 is an incredible buying opportunity, with heavy AI-disruption fear priced in at an 11x forward P/E even as revenue, free cash flow and FCF margins keep rising. Most companies don't know how to implement AI and turn to Salesforce, which already runs their business; a non-tech firm like Williams-Sonoma won't vibe-code a replacement. It is buying back stock aggressively, including a $25B accelerated buyback, and its venture arm owns about 1% of Anthropic. x.comÂ
Salesforce's strong free cash flow and healthy balance sheet support its setup as enterprise AI adoption, Agentforce and AI-driven workflow automation advance. Its earnings gap on four times average volume has been followed by a tightening formation. x.com x.comÂ
Salesforce's $25 billion accelerated share repurchase, the largest ASR in history and half of its $50 billion buyback program, should have an EPS impact people don't yet understand. Its numbers already made it very attractive, and the initial delivery of about 103M shares shows how bullish Marc Benioff is. x.comÂ
Salesforce is fully priced, even a little more than worth paying, for roughly 12% annual growth: trailing revenue of $43B is expected to reach $63B by 2030. A lower price would be needed for a long-term position, and it is not a buy-and-forget stock. x.com x.comÂ
Salesforce's usage-based AI billing can expand revenue beyond traditional software seats. Agentforce ARR has surpassed $1.5 billion, with year-over-year growth more than doubling, while Data 360 supplies customer data for its agents. At about 14-15x forward earnings and a 7.8-8.2% trailing free-cash-flow yield versus the S&P 500 median of 4.5%, Salesforce is a top candidate for returning institutional capital seeking both defense and growth. x.comÂ
Salesforce, at the forefront of CRM for decades, is far likelier to build an even better product for the AI era than companies are to build their own CRM, making it the favorite SaaS name. The case examines what it would take for Salesforce to compound about 27% a year over the next five years. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Salesforce faces real AI threats: more competition, margin headwinds from compute costs and disruption risk for businesses like Tableau and Service Cloud. Agentforce is showing some momentum, and the stock felt oversold earlier, but it is not attractive at current levels. x.comÂ
Salesforce has serious tail upside from explosive growth in agentic AI use, while its 16x P/E prices in only decline, which justified its 20% rally. x.comÂ
Salesforce is betting on itself with a $27 billion stock buyback, which drove most of its very big earnings-per-share beat, and investors should bet on it too. Price target: $265 per share. x.comÂ
Salesforce is underweight because it is adding debt for buybacks just as its AI pivot makes growth less certain. It issued $25 billion of senior notes to fund an accelerated buyback, and S&P revised its outlook to negative as leverage nears the 2x downgrade trigger; weak demand forced a 40 basis point concession. Core SaaS growth is slowing to high single digits, and Agentforce plus Data 360, at $2.9 billion ARR, are under 7% of revenue, exposed if AI seat cannibalization outpaces usage credits. … Show more
Salesforce's roughly $3.6B purchase of customer-agent company Fin brings more AI revenue with less AI risk. Per @StockSavvyShay, Fin resolves an average of 76% of support volume end to end across 30,000+ companies and will expand Agentforce, whose ARR hit $1.2B in Q1 FY27, up 205% year over year. x.com x.comÂ
