The tent costs eleven thousand dollars for four nights, has no bathroom, and the showers are a short walk away in a block that resembles a cruise ship washroom. Charlie Chang paid it anyway, then spent three days knocking on neighboring canvas walls at Coachella‘s Safari campgrounds to ask the people who could afford it a simple question: how do you actually make this kind of money? What he found was less a parade of inherited wealth and more a field study in the specific, unglamorous decisions that preceded the golf cart shuttles and free massage appointments.
From the tents to the yurts, the price tags climb fast
The Safari campgrounds sort guests into a rough hierarchy by spend. Standard tents run nine to eleven thousand dollars for a four-night stay, with additional guests added at three thousand dollars each, meaning a group of four booking late can land a seventeen-thousand-dollar bill before flights or outfits. The residences step up to fifteen thousand, and the yurts at the far end of the grounds push into the thirty-to-forty-thousand-dollar range. The perks scale with the cost: a guest artist pass, golf cart shuttles, free food and drink, and a complimentary thirty-minute massage. One couple staying at the yurts mentioned that when they landed, staff came directly to the tarmac to collect them and drive them straight to their accommodation.
Ben, 28, from Santa Barbara, was among the first neighbors Chang found willing to talk. He runs a social media marketing agency he built after a string of internships with YouTubers, dropping out of film school along the way. He said he had read ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill roughly ninety times before things started to click, which landed somewhere between inspiring and genuinely startling. His weekend spend: fifteen thousand dollars.
Ethan, 30, also from Santa Barbara, produces music professionally, charging between two and ten thousand dollars per song, pulling another twenty-five hundred to five thousand a month from his YouTube channel through course sales, and collecting royalties that had recently delivered a seven-to-eight-thousand-dollar payment covering several months of work. His advice for anyone wanting to get into production: learn song structure first, then the five basic elements, which he listed as bass, drums, mids, vocals, and effects.
The entrepreneurs who built slowly and the ones who risked everything
At the yurts, Luke, 42, from Scottsdale, runs a private equity firm focused on senior housing alongside a construction company, an architectural firm, a management company, a development company, and a marketing agency. When asked how he juggles it, he pointed immediately to his partner: ‘without her I can’t handle any of it.’ His investing philosophy was equally direct: everything goes back into the businesses and the team, because for him the people are the asset.
Christian’s partner, Samara, runs a medical aesthetics business she funded entirely out of her own disposable income while working twelve-hour urgent care and emergency shifts. She took out no business loans and no financing, calculating exactly how many clients she would need before she could transition full-time. She had since opened a second location. ‘Nobody is thinking about you,’ she told Chang. ‘They’re all thinking about themselves. So get over any of that stuff, get out there, just be you.’
Shell, a real estate agent from Denver who operates with her husband and sister, offered a grounding counterpoint to the festival energy around her: ‘A lot of people think it’s easy and it’s not easy. We’re working now, dealing with clients.’ Niraj, 28, who moved from London to Los Angeles and now runs the game studio behind Minecraft, put the college question plainly: ‘If you’re a doctor, go to college. If you’re a lawyer, go to college. If you’re tech or something, you don’t have to.’
Two college students, Audrey and Ella, both 20, were at the Safari campgrounds on birthday gifts from their parents, with summer internships already lined up at American Express and an independent film company in Los Angeles. They were the youngest people Chang interviewed and the most straightforwardly practical: use Google Calendar, get headphones, and go to every club and event you can find.
The nurse and the Beats executive who shared tequila shots with a stranger
Nikki and John, both from Los Angeles, were staying in one of the fifteen-thousand-dollar residences. Nikki works at Beats by Dre, having started at an admin level in the tech industry at Belkin before moving into product development and advancing whenever an opportunity appeared. John is a nurse. Their combined Coachella merchandise spend the previous day: fifteen hundred dollars. Their relationship advice: communication and acceptance. Their advice for affording the experience: save deliberately, or find a job that pays well enough. ‘When you die you can’t take that money with you,’ Nikki said. ‘So have fun now.’
John walked Chang through the residence after their conversation. The room smelled brand new.
The detail Vince from Hong Kong left hanging
Vince, 38, flew in from Hong Kong and paid eleven thousand dollars for his tent. He sells construction materials, learned a second language partly for networking purposes, and described his biggest personal weakness as impatience with people who work at a different pace than he does. He is working on it.
Three days of interviews, a handful of tequila shots, and somewhere between nine and forty thousand dollars per tent later, the Safari campgrounds turned out to hold the same range of people you would find anywhere: some who risked everything, some who calculated every step, two students on their parents’ dime, and at least one person who admitted, without embarrassment, that her boyfriend had dragged her there and she was planning to follow him like a lost puppy for the whole weekend.
