shouldn't SaaS companies like Salesforce that primarily sell their software to corporations be fine for the most part in an economic downturn?

Salesforce is bloated (the CEO said as much) and benefited enormously from the past 10+ years of Fed policy, which allowed them to spam stock for employee comp and expensive acquisitions. For years, investors only cared about "line go up." Well, money is expensive again and top line growth is slowing. This isn't unique to Salesforce, either, they're just the most obvious example.

Check out this illustration of Salesforce's Q3FY23 income statement. What stands out to you? $3.3B in sales and marketing expenses (!!!!!). A net profit of $0.2B on $7.B of revenue. I don't think this accounts for stock-based comp diluting shareholders, either. Check out this chart of shares outstanding over the past five years.

Always seemed odd to me that "OMG SaaS OMG cloud" has such shitty numbers, especially when factoring in shareholder dilutions. We're gonna see how much of this trend was "real," and how much was absolute horse shit underwritten by the Fed + bull market.

This is why Starboard bought a chunk of the company last year; their investment thesis is that Salesforce should be more efficient at returning $ to shareholders. As such, I won't be surprised if Salesforce has more layoffs over the next 12 months. I can also see them becoming what they once hated (Oracle), which I suppose is a good thing if you're a value investor looking to make money.