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It Was Supposed to Be the Safest Building in the World. Then It Cracked.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, 2018, Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, stepped on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to deliver the keynote speech at Dreamforce, his company's annual conference. The event—a combined business meeting, marketing rally, and New Age retreat—attracted more than 100,000 people from around the world, closing off an entire city block.

Benioff had built Salesforce and its core product of cloud-based customer management software from a Telegraph Hill apartment into a $13 billion-revenue-​ a-year juggernaut employing 30,000 people worldwide, with 8,500 in San Francisco. Just a few days before Dreamforce, he'd sealed a deal to purchase the struggling Time magazine, prompting an admiring profile in The New York Times. Completing his apotheosis, September 25, 2018, was Benioff's 54th birthday. After his speech, he could return to his office in the 1,070-foot-high Salesforce Tower, the second-tallest structure west of the Mississippi, whose naming rights he'd purchased in 2017, and look down upon the Salesforce Transit Center and Park, his native city's new crown jewel.

Conventional wisdom warned against Benioff buying naming rights to the transit center. What if there was a wreck or derailment, chaining your brand's name to a disaster? But to Benioff, the potential payoff seemed to outweigh the risk.

Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area's ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West. Naming this structure—the embodiment of a transformative idea—could yield marketing gold for Salesforce. It also could make Benioff a household name on the level of Bezos, Gates, or Zuckerberg.

Benioff took the gamble in 2017, pledging $110 million over 25 years, with $9.1 million up front and the rest committed to supporting operations when the trains started running. For now, the train box sat vacant on the bottom level, awaiting a 1.3-mile tunnel connection.

The rest of the complex had been open for six weeks. Bus traffic was running through the terminal, cutting commute times to the East Bay by up to 20 minutes thanks to its direct ramp to the Bay Bridge. Visitors flocked to the sumptuously landscaped rooftop park, compared by many to Manhattan's famous High Line. The entire four-block-long, million-plus-square-foot structure formed a modernistic gem, environmentally sustainable, covered in an undulating white aluminum exoskeleton patterned by physicist Sir Roger Penrose. Suffused with natural light, the building featured striking, playful art everywhere you turned.

As he took the stage on his birthday at the Moscone Center, Marc Benioff must have been confident his gamble on naming rights had paid off. He couldn't imagine that at that moment, less than a mile away, the ambassadors trained to welcome the public to the STC were now frantically waving commuters away. Rather than Grand Central Station or the High Line, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park suddenly resembled the Titanic.

Earlier that day, workers installing panels in the STC's ceiling beneath the rooftop park un­covered a jagged crack in a steel beam supporting the park and bus deck. "Out of an abundance of caution," officials said, they closed the transit center, rerouting buses to a temporary terminal. Inspectors were summoned. They found a similar fracture in a second beam.

Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditions—low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stress—it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-​review committee overseeing the STC's response to the cracked-beam crisis.