Derek, a 42-year-old personal injury attorney from Orange County, had just checked into a $10,000 tent at the Coachella Safari Campgrounds when Charlie Chang walked up and asked him to justify the bill. Derek paused, almost said no, then laughed. ‘I would like to say no just because I don’t want people to come,’ he admitted, before reversing completely. For anyone who has ever wondered what kind of person pays between $10,000 and $30,000 for four nights in a festival tent, this is that story, and the answer turns out to be more interesting than the price tag.
Chang, a personal finance creator, arrived at the Safari Campgrounds with his own $11,000 cabana booking and a straightforward mission: walk up to strangers across the tents, cabanas, yurts, and the artist compound, ask what they do for a living, and see what shakes loose. The cabana itself, he noted with some amusement after the tour, amounted to a single bed, a fridge, a rug, some lights, and an AC unit that could not be set below 70 degrees without overheating. Two guest passes, golf cart access, free food, and massages rounded out the package.
The people behind the price tags
The Safari draws a specific type: people who have built something over a long time and are willing to spend on the experience of being inside the festival rather than outside it. Charlotte Carell, 55, flew in from Switzerland, where she has run a music festival called Rö for 30 years. Her event runs for five nights, draws between 10,000 and 12,000 people per night, costs between 3 and 4 million Swiss francs annually to produce, and has paid more than one million for a single headliner. She was there for Lady Gaga. Asked what makes a festival owner successful across three decades, she kept it short: ‘The passion.’
Philipe, a French team manager at Alpine, the Formula racing company, was the kind of encounter the campgrounds produce that a normal festival floor never would. He had raced in Formula 3 before moving to the management side. James, 37, from Palo Alto, on his third Safari trip with a $12,000 cabana, sells real estate and once had to shut down an entire city block mid-listing after discovering hundreds of bats in a basement that put the house at risk of explosion. He described his commission on a $15 million sale only as ‘a good commission’ and ‘six figures,’ and spent more time talking about the psychological grit of entrepreneurship than the money.
Cecy, 37, from New Jersey, came from a yurt and brought a different kind of financial story. She retired from the US military after a medical discharge for a back injury and now receives just over $10,000 a month in full retirement benefits while raising her children. A friend’s uncle, whose exact business nobody could quite pin down, had paid for the whole group’s booking. ‘He does a bunch of everything,’ she said. ‘He’s that guy.’
The advice that kept surfacing in 100-degree heat
Chang’s camera overheated so often in the 100-degree desert afternoon that he eventually put a cardboard box over it and kept going. Between technical rescues, a content creator named Raj disclosed that she made $1,000 in a single day selling feet pictures as a YouTube experiment, and had pivoted to plant-based recipe content. Her practical Coachella tip, offered without irony: ‘Go to Monty’s treats and then go to Monty’s matcha, get the matcha, pour it into vanilla ice cream, and make matcha ice cream.’ Carol, 60, the CEO of the Pennsylvania Apartment Association, said the best decade of her life was the one just behind her, after a divorce she described plainly as ‘not a soulmate situation.’ Alex Ryan, 28, a software engineering manager from San Francisco on his first Coachella, split a $4,500-per-person Safari booking across four people and called it worth every dollar as a one-time full commitment.
The investment advice scattered across the campgrounds pointed in the same direction without coordination: hold long-term, find undervalued things, do not trade in and out. The life advice pointed somewhere similar. Derek the attorney put the formula he lives by in nine words: ‘Don’t get too high, don’t get too low.’
The matcha still sitting out
Somewhere near the pool area, a cup of matcha poured over vanilla ice cream sat in the afternoon heat, Raj’s specific unsolicited festival hack for a stranger with a camera and an overheating lens.
Chang packed up on day three, one planned interview session short after accidentally leaving the microphone off for an entire round of conversations. The Safari Campgrounds were emptying. He was not sure he would be back the following year, which made the whole thing feel a little more like what Derek had described at the very start: worth it, even if you can’t quite explain why on a room tour.
