| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. The Burning Man festival, held in late August in the Nevada desert, has billionaire devotees, more than 100 offshoot events and a cult following. So, writer Ted Alcorn asks, why is the organization behind it struggling to stay afloat? You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. If you’ve ever encountered a Burner, chances are you’ve been schooled on a few things: the packing lists that rival military ops, the degree of enlightenment achievable through libertine excess and the revelation that in Black Rock City, Nevada, money is virtually useless. The annual Burning Man gathering forbids commerce, so for nine days each late August, almost 80,000 people get by on supplies they’ve brought and gifts from fellow attendees. There might be a two-story fire-spewing octopus or a jetliner fuselage tricked out like a rave cave, but except for a few authorized sites where one can buy ice to keep food from spoiling in the heat, not so much as a dollar bill is exchanged. Money, however, is something Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that runs the event, can’t do without. And lately it’s been an increasingly urgent concern. Last year, after Burning Man Project spent around $59 million throwing the bacchanal, tickets failed to sell out, putting the year’s revenue on track to fall $20 million short of expenses. Its leaders stumbled out of the desert and found themselves staring down a financial cliff. “Everything is now at risk,” Chief Executive Officer Marian Goodell wrote in a series of online missives sharing the news last fall. This news would prompt most conventional organizations to shift into monetization mode, particularly if they had a direct line to the world’s richest moguls. Larry Page and Sergey Brin long ago selected Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO in part because he was a fellow Burner. Dustin Moskovitz invited Mark Zuckerberg to attend in 2012 because, as he detailed in a Medium post, “I thought it would make him grow as a person and the world better off as a result; I believe that’s exactly what happened.” Sam Altman called the festival “the most beautiful man-made thing I have ever seen” and suggested it was “what a post-AGI [artificial general intelligence] world can look like.” Elon Musk and billionaire Tesla Inc. board member Joe Gebbia, who’s helping to implement the Department of Government Efficiency, are both longtime devotees. But Burning Man Project, whose mission is to “uphold and manifest the values” of Burning Man—including self-reliance, self-expression and immediacy—is handcuffed by its own guiding philosophy, which also forbids “commodification.” It can’t commercialize its 1.6 million followers on Instagram or the creations that premiere at the festival. It can’t seek sponsorships, advertise or sell merch. And it doesn’t typically license or franchise its brand, a conundrum that’s particularly acute because in recent years it’s bled attendees who’ve decided that instead of making the pricey Nevada trek, they can bring their creations to a local grassroots gathering. Today there’s a network of about 100 of these regional Burning Man gatherings run and attended by devoted Burners around the globe, from Mexico to Australia. The Burning Man mother ship makes sure these offshoots meet safety guidelines and follow its philosophical principles, even lending the use of its name and logo. But it doesn’t hit them up for money, even as they cannibalize the main event.  Goodell in San Francisco in June. Photographer: Winni Wintermeyer Goodell says that, to spread the Burning Man gospel, it has to succeed as a business; as she puts it, it can’t be “afraid of money, short on money, worried about money.” But she sees danger in letting financial survival become the mission. “I am loath to look at Burning Man as a product, where the goal is to sell as much of the product as possible,” she says. This stance puts the organization in the unusual position of needing the one thing it’s been designed to ignore. Now it has to find that cash, either by cutting costs or by hitting up Burners. Board Chair Dennis Bartels, who led San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum for a decade, warns that in merely contemplating moneymaking actions to balance its books, Burning Man Project risks losing its unique character. “The forces trying to make you look and be like everybody else are insidious and everywhere,” he says. Indeed, it wouldn’t take much to spark a revolt. When, as part of its ticket promotion this spring, the organization reposted a slickly edited TikTok video featuring seminude attendees trampolining, wrestling and taking shots to an electronic dance music soundtrack, Burners on Reddit lost their minds. “What the absolute f--- is this,” wrote one. The top comment called out the video’s “radical commodification.” Burning Man has weathered disasters before. In 1997 the US government denied organizers a permit, so they briefly relocated to private land. A decade later a dispute among the event’s originators turned into a lawsuit, resulting in an acrimonious split. In 2017 a participant ran into the flames of the event’s eponymous effigy and later died of his injuries. A 2023 monsoon stranded tens of thousands of people in a muddy quagmire and triggered a flood of gleeful media coverage. Journalists have swarmed even when the drama is less than existential. The first year the event made a decent profit, headline writers fretted about how the founders would “cope” with cash. Later they decried the “fiasco” that tickets had sold out and scalpers were taking advantage. Burning Man has become as much a cultural fixture as an endless source of schadenfreude: The more earnestly its adherents reach for utopia, the more everyone else delights in watching them face-plant in the dust. “One of the things that’s charming and annoying about the Burning Man community is its exceptionalism,” says David Festa, who led the organization’s fundraising team in 2024. The belief is that “we’re so special, we’re amazing, we’re saving the world.” Festa, who left Burning Man Project in December, says he worries that self-importance gives the group a sense of infallibility. “If they don’t make it this year, it’s almost a story of too little, too late,” he says. Mercedes Martinez, a member of the organization’s 22-member board, agrees that its overconfidence could create lethal blind spots. “There’s some statistic about who ends up dying more often in rock-climbing accidents,” she says. “It’s not the newbies, right? It’s not the new ones. It’s the ones that have done this mountain six times, and they fail to see the little markers.” Keep reading: Burning Man Is Burning Through Cash |
