Burning Man Finances Revealed

[some seeing eye]

BM has always published some things and not published some things. They publish the event expenses, but not the ticket revenues.

They are starting to publish more.

Some info is starting to flow in the form of the 2013 non profit tax form. The org closes the 2014 year I think end of March or April of 2015 then it takes them 3-4 months to do the afterburn report. There is a post about all of this on the BMORG blog. Some of the suspicions that the founders were skimming millions off the Decommodification LLC or from selling the event to the non-profit are shown to not be true. Just suggest if you consider yourself a suspicious of "the man" person, or just curious, you might enjoy reading, and staying tuned as more info is released next year. And this thread could be a discussion thread.

http://blog.burningman.com/2015/01/news ... -released/

[Elderberry]

Does that mean I'll finally be exonerated?

[Lonesomebri]

I wish I had a tenth of the lawyers the BMP had who drew up this arrangement, to go over the release and help explain to me what was revealed here and what was not. But yeah, as explained in their explanation of expenses, the BMP are all generous, honest and noble. As long as the members of this noble crew don't get involved in setting up boutique hotels for wealthy disconnected clients in BRC, it looks good to me.... heck....somewhere in there is the money I gave them.

[digital]

Why do you need a bunch of lawyers to go over it? It's not exactly a complicated document. Did you actually read it?

I found it interesting LH was #3 on the pole. Apparently H.Dubois is queen. Go figue. She's actually pretty cool.

Good work, Org.

[pink]

They're each getting slightly over 1 million in charitable write offs. And will have very little taxable income from the sale (I figure 26k) taxed at capital gain rates.

Next year we will see the salaries.

[trilobyte]

Thanks for the post, some seeing eye. It is good info, and I'm glad to see that there's a separate piece of annual reporting for Burning Man Project (BMP) as an entity. As time goes by I think that will become increasingly important, as it becomes more fully self-sufficient in its year-round activities and also as they get up to doing more things in the world. It will be interesting to see how the AfterBurn report may change (if it changes at all) now that 'the transaction' has happened and Burning Man the LLC is now under the umbrella of BMP.

Of course, regardless of how much or how little they share, there will be critics. Once an event has developed its own community, then the organizers become 'the man' and are damned if they do, damned if they don't.