Has Burning Man Burned Out?

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Aaron Sanders still remembers the first time he bought a ticket to Burning Man. The year was two thousand and eight. He was an artist living in San Francisco and he couldn't wait to head to rural Nevada for a week long radical gathering in the middle of the desert.

So you could go into the record shop and they just had like a stack of Burning Man tickets and you buy them. I think at the time they were maybe like I don't know, three hundred bucks or something like that, Like is you know, still a lot of money for me at the time, But you know, I was like, this is amazing. And then I you know, skipped home like Charlie and the Chocolate factory, like I have a gold you know. It's just really really exciting.

And like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, Burning Man was also otherworldly, wonderful and weird. Tens of thousands of people all camping together in a makeshift city. There was art and music and biking and community.

It was amazing, and you know, kept on going for another twelve years straight something like that, like right up until the pandemic.

But while the experience over those twelve years was amazing, Aaron says, getting tickets got harder and harder every year.

Everyone I know, you know, we will set up like a basically like little mini land setup with like several computers and all trying to you know, make sure somebody gets in line to be able to buy tickets.

It's like buying Tis with tickets for oh, for the.

It was really like you know, into where you know, you'd go to the friend's house that has like the best Wi Fi or like the strongest, like the widest bandwidth. You know, they can you know, just because it could come down to like seconds, and.

If you didn't score a ticket right when they came out, well that meant you were in for another mad dash to find one second hand. It also meant that if you had an extra ticket, you could always find a buyer.

You know, like there's always somebody that was looking for a ticket or that wanted a ticket, you know, even up until the very last minute.

Burning Man took a couple years off during the pandemic, and so did Aarin. He moved to New York with his partner. They opened an art gallery, which now also doubles as a cannabis dispensary, and when burning Man tickets went on sale earlier this year, Aaron decided to buy some. But then July came around and he realized taking a week off work and making the truck from the East Coast wouldn't be in the cards, so he decided to

Well, I mean so far. I mean, this was when David reached out. That was the first bite that I got. Really, so that was.

That would be big take producer David Fox looking for an interview, not a ticket.

I mean I initially put it out there at twelve hundred bucks for a parking pass plus two tickets, which normally I think the tickets are going for like five seventy five, and then the parking pass is like one point fifty, and so you know, I was selling them for underface value, but not like significantly underface It was more just kind of like, will anybody want them at this price? Like at this point, you know, I would probably take what I can get.

And Aaron isn't alone in his resale woes. Every single year since twenty eleven Burning Man tickets have sold out almost immediately until now, and Bloomberg's Ellen Hewitt says that's a big deal.

Demand for Burning Man is down this year. I think it's just like a really interesting indicator of something pretty fundamental about it changing.

Today on the show, has burning Man Burned Out? I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg Names.

My name is Ellen Hewitt. I'm a features writer on the tech team at Bloomberg News. So I write for Bloomberg News and for Bloomberg Business Week, and I'm based in San Francisco. And I've also been to berning Man eight times.

Eight times.

Yeah, I know perfect. One time it was for only twenty four hours. But if you're counting the number of times that I've been to I've entered the desert, yes, it's eight. I counted last night.

Needless to say, Ellen, like Aaron, has built up years of expertise going out to black Rock City in the Nevada Desert, or to use the correct term. She spent a lot of time out on the plaia taking it all in. What brings you there year after year? What do you do all week?

I think the pattern that a lot of people who end up getting really into Burning Man they have some experience probably similar to mine, which is the first time you go, a friend brings you, or you know, someone kind of helps guide the way. They tell you, oh, you need to bring this and that and here's what you might expect. And you go the first time and you're just taking it in and you're like.

Wow, this is so incredible. Look at it. This art like it's really fun. You meet all lots of interesting people.

It feels very separate from like the default world, which is what they call normal life, and I think that's a big attraction for a lot of people. So, you know, after my first year, I remember my friend asked me like, Okay, now that you've seen what's there, like, what would you be really excited about adding to black Rock City next year? And I built a like twenty foot tall swing set because I was like, oh, I really want more swing sets at Burning Man, and I want them to be very tall, you know.

Than we wanted to put on like.

Wacky events, like one year we hosted an event called Barbershop Barbershop where some of us sang barbershop quartet songs and other people offered amateur haircuts and people actually came and got their haircut at our camp.

Yeah, like you, I feel like a lot of the people I know that go to Burning Man are really creative, really artistic, really like backpacking or camping. But my other impression is that it's really popular with like Silicon Valley people. Is that true? What is its connection with the tech industry.

It's this weird overlap because there is a lot of Burning Man that has nothing to.

Do with Silicon Valley.

Like there's a lot of people who come and you know, they're from Germany or they're from la or it's just like not why they're there. At the same time, spending time in Silicon Valley here going to Birningman is like so normal. It's like everyone, not everyone, but like a lot of people do it. It's no longer this like surprising thing.

And it isn't just for run of the mill Silicon Valley tech workers.

I saw sarahgay Brand like the first time I went to Burning Man.

In fact, Google and Burning Man have a pretty long history.

There's some classic stories like Larry Page and Saragai Brand when they were tasked with picking a CEO to take over at Google like an adult in the room.

They had a bunch of.

People they were considering, and in the end they picked Eric Schmidt because he was the only candidate who had already been to Burning Man.

Why was that so attractive? Why did they want someone to run Google who had been.

To Burning In.

I think they thought that going to Burning Man, and like choosing to go to Burning Man was indicative of some essence of spirit within him that they wanted to have at Google. And to be clear, they had been to Burning Man many times, Like the very first Google doodle from nineteen ninety eight, it's actually the burning Man symbol, which is like a little man made out of two

Flash forward to the twenty tens and Ellen says it was almost odd to not trek out to the Applia every August if you lived a certain type of Silicon Valley life.

You have Elon Musk saying that you know, if you've never been to Burning Man, like you wouldn't understand it, and like Burning Man is spiritually basically the same as Silicon bat So.

What's different about this year?

This year something has changed. Tickets did not sell out, and this is the first time that this has happened since twenty eleven. And this has just made things really complicated for people I know who are running camps. A lot of them bought tickets early and have extra ones and they're trying to like offload them and people are

Coming up after the break, Why is burning Man no longer such a hot ticket? And what does it say about what's going on in Silicon Valley. For the first time in more than a decade, Burning Man tickets have not sold out. I asked Bloomberg's Ellen Hewitt whether anyone saw this coming.

There was like a little rumbling, but not anything like this.

Ellen says, there's no one clear reason why demand is down, but I still wanted to test a few theories. I texted a few of my burner friends and one of them said, what I'm reading is fewer sparkle ponies in the way of the true believers.

Yeah, I think that could be very real.

Full disclosure, I did have to ask Ellen to help me translate that sentence.

A sparkle pony is a loving but derogatory term for someone who is new to berning Man and exhibiting maybe a lack of self reliance. So one of the principles of burning Man is self reliance, which means being able to provide for yourself physically, emotionally. All that sparkle ponies might show up in like a cute outfit, but forget a coat gets very cold that night, and if they're freezing and shivering and need your help and can't provide.

For themselves, then okay, So you don't want to be a sparkle bony.

Don't be a sparkle pony. Find a friend who will give you enough gear advice so that you can take care of yourself.

A census of last year's burners found that a record number were first timers, so perhaps there were more sparkle ponies in the mix in twenty twenty three who ended up deciding once was enough. Those newbies, along with the PLIA hardened regulars, had to deal with another historic event last year.

In twenty twenty three.

As many of you probably heard, it rained a lot at burning Man and the whole Clia turned to basically like a mud puddle.

Nature sent torrential rains the equivalent of two months worth in a single day.

But brain conditions haven't happened in over a decade, so we had just the worst conditions possible. You couldn't want.

I was never in such a rate before, But it wasn't that bad.

I was there. It was very fun.

I actually had a really great time, But it was really stressful for a lot of reasons, like people who wanted to leave couldn't leave. People's like infrastructure and equipment. Some of it got like wet, and that's really hard to deal with, especially if the store it throughout the year.

So twenty twenty three was a hard year, a.

Hard, soggy year on the Plaia. But it was also a hard year, as Burners might say, in the default world. Prices of everything from groceries to housing shot up and strained the US economy, and Ellen says that might be another reason fewer people than usual are springing for tickets.

Burning Man's really expensive.

If you order online from the website, the most basic ticket to this year's Burning Man costs six hundred and eighty three dollars and eighty eight cents. That's with taxes and fees. A parking pass is another one hundred and fifty four dollars, and then you need to factor in the cost of traveling to Nevada and all the gear and supplies you need to sustain yourself in the desert for a week. It all adds up.

And so for some people it just may not be something they can afford.

This year Burning Man could be another victim of inflation.

Yeah, that's that's I think that's a big possibility.

Like anything that starts underground and ends up blowing up, there's always going to be somebody that believes the good old days are over.

I think there's always you know, there's sort of the joke at birning Man is that like, oh, it was cooler last year.

But ticket sales don't lie. It's clearly an extra off year for the event with the mud, the economy, and the generational vibes all possible explanations. So I had to ask Ellen straight up, has Burning Man peaked?

This is speculation, but I do think it's possible that, yeah, Burning Man has become too mainstream, and if you see a drop in popularity, it might be reflecting that. It might be reflecting people feeling like this thing that used to feel like an unusual or sort of like countercultural

That and.

You know what once was a signal about Eric Schmidt versus other CEO candidates, Now it's kind of like I think, you know, at your most cynical, you could say that if you're in Silicon Valley, going to Burning Man is a good way to network, Like that is a very different scenario than it was, you know, ten or fifteen years ago.

But even if some people may be taking a break from Burning Man, Ellen says that like a phoenix from the ashes. There's always a chance it can rise again.

And if it survives, I hope that it can have this kind of dip in which it maybe evolves into something new or returns to some sort of roots.

And as for Aaron, who's still hoping that a serious buyer will respond to his Craigslist ad, well, he told me he has a plan to sweeten the deal, and it involves his newly up and running cannabis business.

What we're going to try and do actually is just tie it in to kind of like a promotional giveaway for our dispensary, And so it's going to be the mother of all giveaways or giveaway do tickets and the parking paths if we're basically signing up for our newsletter.

Burning Man officially starts on Sunday, August twenty fifth. Ellen won't be there, her summer is already too busy. But if she changes her mind, I think I know where we can get a good deal on a couple of tickets. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox with Thomas lou. It was mixed by Alex Suguia. It was fact checked by Thomas lou Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Kim Gettleson, who also edited this episode. Our senior editor