‘Burning Man’ Founders Mum on Payout as Festival Goes Nonprofit

Burning Man, an annual arts festival and mass gathering in the Nevada desert, has attracted questions about its finances as it makes a switch from for-profit to nonprofit, The New York Times reports.

Founded in 1986, the festival finances its operations largely through ticket sales. Its six owners are now starting a three-year process of cashing out their stakes and shifting control to a nonprofit group, the Burning Man Project.

Burning Man annually posts its expenditures at its Web site but does not report revenues, and the owners have declined to disclose the payouts they will receive for their stakes.

The festival’s founder, Larry Harvey, said the figure exceeds the $20,000 payment Burning Man has publicized in the past as the sole fee any owner would get for leaving but will not make he and his colleagues rich.

The weeklong festival, which began Monday, attracts tens of thousands of people to a makeshift desert city at which participants provide all the art, entertainment, food, and water, based largely on a barter system. Some regulars, known as “burners,” have expressed misgivings over a lack of financial transparency by the company.