Salesforce CEO met with WSJ's Steiger about article

Remember last week when we posted a link to a Valleywag story about Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, who had Wall Street Journal reporter Pui-Wing Tam detained in Hawaii on the site of his new mansion? If you don’t, read here.

Valleywag followed up the story, and it turns out that Benioff actually flew to New York to meet with Journal managing editor Paul Steiger before Tam went to Hawaii to protest the story.

Valleywag wrote, “The timeline makes Benioff’s actions seem all the more ludicrous: the Salesforce.com CEO flew to New York to complain about threats to his personal security, before the Journal reporter, had even set foot in Hawaii. And it was after the Journal reassured a paranoid Benioff that she was working on an innocuous feature, on the homes of the rich and famous, that the tech exec still had his construction crew detain her, and call the police. As if the intruder was a Siebel Systems suicide bomber, rather than the Journal’s mousey, mild-mannered Pui-Wing Tam, pictured above with her baby Sophie. A spokesman for Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, confirmed the meeting with Benioff to Valleywag; the full statement is after the jump.

“Some days before Ms. Tam went to Hawaii on her reporting trip, Mr. Benioff met with Mr. Steiger to express concerns about a possible article. This was hardly unusual, as subjects of Journal articles from time to time raise issues with senior editors at the paper before stories are published. Details of the conversation are private, but we can say that Mr. Benioff’s concerns were focused on personal security, particularly that of his then-fiancée, and we assured him that we would be mindful of those concerns to the extent we could in fully reporting the story.”

Read more here. Tam has had a big year. She was also one of the reporters who was spied upon by Hewlett-Packard.