Burning Man attracts wealthy tech founders despite its anti-materialist ethos. In the early 2010s, many billionaire tech figures became regular attendees, often arriving with upscale camps and private planes. Recent years show a notable decline in visible billionaire presence at this year's festival. Reasons for absences include heavy professional commitments, active funding deals, growing family responsibilities, and challenging festival conditions such as 2023 floods and 2024 storms that led to gate closures. High-profile parents and intensified business pressures have limited participation from some longtime attendees.
Burning Man - the festival that eschews materialism, commodification, and capitalism - has paradoxically become associated with some of the wealthiest men on the planet. In the early 2010s, news started to come out that tech's billionaire class - the Google cofounders, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Uber cofounder Garrett Camp, and Tesla leader Elon Musk, among others - were regular attendees of the festival. They made headlines for their fancy RV camps and the Black Rock City airport for private planes.
But, in recent years, it seems many of the most notable billionaire Burners have ditched the festival. As of Friday afternoon, most of the usual suspects hadn't been spotted or posted publicly about attending. Their absences may not have anything to do with a shift in cultural cache or the less-than-desirable conditions that the festival has faced over the past few years - in 2023, Burning Man descended into flooded chaos, and this year, storms have caused the Black Rock City gates to close periodically.
"He's been busy," a spokesperson for venture capital billionaire Josh Kushner wrote when asked why he hasn't been spotted on the Playa this year. She pointed to Thrive Capital's reported involvement in two active funding rounds, one for Databricks and another for OpenAI. Not to mention that Kushner's wife, supermodel and fellow Burner Karlie Kloss, is in her third trimester of pregnancy.
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