Benioff was born David Friedman in New York City, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family with ancestral roots in Austria, Romania, Germany, Poland and Russia. He is the son of Barbara (née Benioff) and Stephen Friedman, a former head of Goldman Sachs. He has two older sisters, Suzy and Caroline, and grew up in Manhattan, first in Peter Cooper Village, then on 86th Street where he spent most of his childhood, before eventually moving near the U.N. headquarters when he was 16.
