Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and San Francisco officials are marking the laying of the final beam — a construction milestone known as "topping off" — at its new global headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
"They take the last structural beam and everybody signs it," Elizabeth Pinkham, Salesforce executive vice president of global real estate, said in advance of Thursday's planned ceremony. "Then they hoist it up to the top."
The building rises 1,070 feet high and is the tallest U.S. office building west of Chicago. Salesforce, a cloud-computing company that specializes in customer relationship management, is the "anchor tenant" and will occupy floors three to 30 and the top two levels, 60 and 61. Rather than designating the two top floors for executive offices, Salesforce will keep them open to all employees and their guests, Pinkham said.
Other tenants will include Salesforce partner Accenture, which wanted proximity to the enterprise tech company, CBRE and Bain & Company. Construction is set to be completed in July. The landlords are Boston Properties, which has a 95 percent stake in the building and Hines, which owns the rest.
Right now, the building still looks like a construction site — there is no trace yet of the fancy office furniture synonymous with tech company offices — and construction workers are in the process of building out the skeleton of the building and installing the windows.
"I'm used to being up there with no windows, so it's going to be weird with windows," said Pinkham.
Click ahead for a first look.
— By CNBC's Harriet Taylor
Published 6 April 2017