Fabian, a 29-year-old one-man media operation from Las Vegas, was sitting in a golf cart at the Coachella Safari campgrounds when he summed up his entire morning routine in one sentence: wake up anywhere between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., get coffee, make his posts. The campground he was staying at books for as little as $9,000 a weekend, and the residence-style tents on the same property run at least $288,000. The people inside them turned out to be some of the more quietly instructive voices at a music festival most people associate with flower crowns and overpriced cocktails. Charlie Chang spent Coachella Weekend 1 moving between the ultra-private Safari campground, invite-only parties, and the festival grounds itself, asking one simple question: what do you actually do for a living?
The Safari campground crowd had done the math
Fabian’s meme and Vegas news page earns one client alone $9,000 a month in sponsored integrations, and his three-person Safari split came out to $3,500 a head. A mother-daughter pair from Jupiter, Florida, came in at a different scale entirely: Jamie, a real estate flipper who got into the business after her divorce three years ago, put the total bill for four people at $41,000. Her most recent flip cleared $800,000 in profit after a $1 million renovation held over two years. Her advice for South Florida homeowners was specific: impact windows and a strong roof, because insurance is otherwise unworkable. Her plus-one, a divorce attorney who came along for the weekend, said she had originally wanted to study theater and went to law school instead. ‘Do what you fear and fear will disappear’ is her life motto, delivered without a trace of irony.
Jeff and Karen Leibowitz arrived having spent upward of $50,000 including airfare. Jeff runs a commercial construction company that builds out franchises, from Planet Fitnesses to medical spas to Crumbl Cookies, across the country. His early lesson from a union ironworking company in New York: chasing sales volume without watching margins turned a multi-million-dollar business into one that was losing money every month. Karen credited their MBA programs at UConn, where they met, as the single best financial decision either of them ever made.
Audrey, a 33-year-old psychology and business student who helped start a credit card processing company called Merchant Chimp, came as a guest of friends who had been attending since around 2006. The group’s all-in cost, including dinners and ancillary events, averaged roughly $20,000 per person. Her friends were early hires at major tech companies. ‘Just not being afraid of what people thought,’ she said, was the thing she wished she had started earlier.
The party circuit and the festival floor produced a different kind of resume
At the invite-only parties, Chang met Taylor Price, 23, founder of a financial literacy platform for Gen Z and the app Savvy Spend Smart, which optimizes credit card deals for users. Her worst purchase was a secondhand washer from Facebook Marketplace that exploded mid-meeting and flooded the central air system, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Her best was starting dollar-cost averaging into index funds at 17 or 18. ‘If you can find something that you can get paid for, that the world needs, that you’re good at, and love doing,’ she said, ‘you are finding the ikigai.’
Isan, 24 and turning 25 the day of the interview, started his career sleeping in his car around Los Angeles, shooting videos for anyone who would let him. He now runs a talent management company that hit $1.2 million in revenue last year, working with creators across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. His framework for luck was straightforward: ‘If I show up seven times a week and you show up four times a week, I am bound to get lucky more than you are.’
Conor Lim, co-founder of Steezy, an online dance education platform with over 2 million registered users across more than 100 countries, launched the business at 22 after a blog about behind-the-scenes dance culture pulled 70,000 page views in its first two weeks. His next decade involves launching what he described as a Formula One of dance, a professional league with a full competitive season held in cities like Miami, New York, and Los Angeles.
Yas, a violinist and songwriter performing that weekend with a major artist at 9:30 p.m., holds six Grammy certificates and was candid about the economics of a music career: ‘If you have a label, they’re just a bank. They’re fronting you the money and you still owe it to them.’ Her largest single-gig payday was $20,000.
On the general festival grounds, Lauren, who works in entertainment finance handling TV forecasting, offered the most grounded logistical tip of the entire weekend: after years of arriving Wednesday night, waking at 3 a.m. Thursday, and setting up camp by 5 a.m., the upgrade to Preferred camping cost $200 and bought back her sleep. Three double Jameson shots for the group at the festival bar came out to $91 before tip.
Jasmine, backstage with a needle
Jasmine, an aesthetic nurse practitioner from Orange County who also DJs, performed her first DJ set the day before the interview. She treats patients with everything from chemical peels to Botox and fillers, has treated multiple famous clients whose names she cannot share under HIPAA, and considers the most unconventional rule in her life to be ‘sometimes to be selfish.’ Her Coachella advice: bring face masks and a lot of sunscreen.
The golf carts at the Safari campground were still running loops when Chang wrapped the weekend. Fabian had said the carts alone made the $3,500 ticket worth it, and watching the full cross-section of people who moved through that property, from a construction entrepreneur who once mistook sales volume for success to a violinist with six Grammy certificates who described her career trajectory as anything but a straight line, it was hard to argue with him.
