Marc Benioff is the latest tech billionaire to buy a famous magazine

IN THE 20th century people could become wealthy philanthropists by starting publications. Henry Luce and his business partners raised $86,000 to start Time magazine in 1923, but he left a fortune of more than $100m when he died in 1967. These days, wealthy philanthropists become press barons by rescuing publications like Mr Luce’s brainchild.

On September 16th Marc Benioff, a co-founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-software company, and his wife, Lynne Benioff, purchased Time for $190m. They are the latest in a series of tech billionaires to invest in print journalism, following Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, who bought the Washington Post in 2013, and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve, Apple’s co-founder, who took a majority stake in the Atlantic last year. Each has avowed a civic interest in supporting journalism, not meddling in it.

Time has grappled with financial uncertainty for over a decade. In 2014 Time Warner, its parent, spun it off, along with other titles including Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, into an entity called Time Inc, raising fears that the magazines would languish as unloved corporate orphans. Last year, to cut costs, Time reduced its print circulation from 3m, announcing a new target of 2m. In January this year Meredith, an American media company, bought Time Inc for $1.8bn, and assumed another $1bn in debt. That deal was backed by Charles and David Koch, billionaire brothers who are active in Republican politics, prompting ill-founded fears of a conservative takeover of the newsweekly.

What Time needs from its latest owners, besides their largesse, is a vision that can sustain it as a business. Many newspapers and magazines have folded in the past decade, some of them prominent names with long histories—the Village Voice, a newspaper in New York, shuttered in August. Media-watchers argue that the fame of the Time brand should enable it to survive, but thus far it has done so by way of belt-tightening. It has yet to strike a rich new vein of earnings in the digital age. The magazine’s revenue is expected to decline this year, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, from $173m to $158m.

Mr Benioff might be able to help. He is hailed as a master marketer and salesman (some call it “marc-eting”). He reportedly wants staff at Time to ponder what the publication should look like in 2040. But even if they fail to work that out, with his resources (about $7bn) at least Time should still be around 22 years from now—which was not something that seemed as likely before this week’s news.

In the meantime, the Benioffs are taking on some political risk. As the owner of a prominent media property he, like Mr Bezos, may well draw the ire of President Donald Trump. Shareholders in Salesforce might worry about retaliation. The Benioffs declared upon purchase that they would not be involved in the day-to-day operations of the magazine. That may not matter if unflattering images of the president appear on the cover.