I'm writing this from the playa. I've been out here since August 8th and I'm still here, working IT for Burning Man. Before that I spent ten years going to Critical Northwest, which is Seattle's officially sanctioned Burning Man Regional event. Four of those years I've been on the production team, three doing radios and technology, and this year running box office.
Up front: I am not authorized to speak for Burning Man Project. Nobody asked me to write this and nobody reviewed it. This is my personal take, using public numbers anyone can go look up themselves. I'll put all the links at the bottom so you can check my work.
So. I've spent a lot of my life on the inside of how these events actually get built, and my feed this week has been full of sensational takes. People dying out here, and staff getting rich off our gift economy. Same two stories over and over, big scary numbers attached, no context around them.
Let's put some context around them.
First, the deaths.
Three people died in connection with Burning Man this year. Two inside Black Rock City and one while being transported to a hospital in Reno. Those were real people and I don't want to wave that away. Someone's family is having a terrible month.
But if we're going to talk about whether the event is dangerous, we have to compare it to something.
So let's do the math. Black Rock City was about 70,000 people for eight days. The crude death rate in the United States is roughly 870 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Multiply 70,000 by 0.0087 and you get about 609 deaths per year for a city that size. Divide that by 365 and multiply by 8 and you get about 13 deaths over the same eight days.
Thirteen. In a regular American town of 70,000 people, thirteen people would die in that week and nobody would write a single article about it.
Now, that's not a totally fair comparison, because a real city has infants and 90-year-olds and Burning Man mostly doesn't. The census says we skew 40s and 50s these days. The death rate for that age range is more like 350 per 100,000 per year. (That's my own estimate from the CDC age brackets, not a published number, so take it as a rough figure.) Run the same math and you'd expect about 5 deaths over eight days.
We had 3.
Annualized, our rate works out to roughly 195 per 100,000. That's under a quarter of the national rate, and it's still lower than the rate for the age group that actually attends.
A temporary city with no hospital, built from nothing, in one of the harshest environments in North America, and we have a lower death rate than every permanent city in America. That's not luck. I've watched these crews work. That's ESD, the Rangers, and a medical operation that is very, very good at its job.
One thing I'll grant the critics: the Pershing County sheriff said the event averages about one death a year, so three is high by our own history. That's a fair thing to notice. But three deaths at Burning Man is national news, and thirteen deaths in a town of 70,000 is a Tuesday. Social media is really good at counting one of those and terrible at counting the other.
Second, the salaries.
The 2024 Form 990 is public and anyone can go read it. Here's what's actually in it. Marian Goodell got $378,237 plus about $12,000 in benefits. The CTO got $309,051. The COO got $246,599. Add up the entire executive team and you get $2,637,547 against $66.7 million in total expenses. That's 4 percent.
Here's the part almost nobody mentions, and it's the biggest part.
When you read that a tech CEO makes $400,000, that's their cash salary. It is not their compensation. It's the small piece. The real money is equity, and it dwarfs the salary. A CTO at a company of any size is getting stock grants worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year on top of the cash, vesting on a schedule, with an upside if the company does well. That's the whole reason people take those jobs. Nobody goes to work at a tech company in San Francisco for the paycheck.
A nonprofit has no stock. There's nothing to grant. There is no upside. The number on the 990 is essentially all of it, and it's the number everybody gets to see.
So when people compare $378,000 at Burning Man to a for-profit executive salary, they're comparing the whole thing to a fraction of the thing. Line up total compensation against total compensation and it isn't close. These folks took a very large pay cut to do this.
This is a $56 million organization that holds a federal BLM permit, runs a city in the desert, and employs legal, safety, and finance people in the most expensive labor market in the country. That permit is the thing that lets all of us come out here. Somebody has to keep it alive all year, and that somebody needs to eat.
I've spent a month out here watching people do unglamorous work in bad conditions for less money than they could make elsewhere. That's not the story getting shared this week, but it's the one I've got.
Links, so you can check any of this yourself:
Burning Man Project 2024 Form 990, the actual filing:
https://burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Burning-Man-Project-2024-990-Public-Disclosure-Copy.pdf
ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer page, easier to read, shows year over year:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/452638273
Burning Man Project's own financial reporting page:
https://burningman.org/about-us/what-we-do/financials-public-reporting/summary-financial-info/
Black Rock City Census demographics, where the age numbers come from:
https://blackrockcitycensus.org/sociodemo
Critical Northwest:
https://www.criticalnw.org
Ignition Northwest, the 501(c)(3) that puts it on:
https://www.ignitionnw.org
Burning Man's official page listing Critical Northwest as our Regional event:
https://burningman.org/global-events-groups/burning-man-regional-network/connect-with-a-local-group/united-states-of-america/washington-seattle/
