Music: “The Last Breath (Chillout Version)” by Hamaeel
Join the tribute livestream for Cameron: Sunday, November 15, at 3pm ET / noon PT / 8pm Lisbon. Watch it live on YouTube.
Yesterday I received the devastating news that my dear friend Cameron Burg had passed away.
Cameron was well known on the Burner scene, a double digit Burner (Playa name: “Dispatch”) who over the years had camped with Opulent Temple, Distrikt, Mayan Warrior, Dancetronauts and more. Although we met through Burning Man, I mostly knew him through business. He was a multi-faceted character, loved and respected in many different circles all around the world. I’ll share some memories here, and I encourage anyone reading this to do the same – there’s a voice line where you can share stories.
If you have more information, please share it in the comments, and check back, because we will update this post as more facts come in.
He was found in his apartment in Lisbon, Portugal by police on Saturday, after a wellness check. His body is being returned to his family in Los Angeles. I have no information about an official funeral, but we will be hosting an unofficial wake for him on Sunday, Nov 15th at Noon Pacific Time (3pm US Eastern, 8pm Lisbon). Please call in and share your memories of Cameron. If you have any photos or videos, please post them here in the comments, we will show as many as we can during the wake.
Cameron attended the Crossroads school in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, where his classmates included Jack Black, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Hudson. He was on the neurodivergent spectrum, I’m not sure if he was ever formally diagnosed but as his friend this was pretty clear. This is so commonly accepted in modern California that it’s just part of life, but perhaps caused difficulty in him fitting in with some circles – which never stopped him trying. He was always boldly and brashly himself.
My favorite of many amusing adventures with Cameron was when we went on a boat cruise DJ’d by Cosmic Gate in Miami during the Ultra festival. Cameron met us in line with his lime green parasol and his banana hip flask – full of liquor, even though he was never much of a drinker (at least by Aussie/Kiwi standards!). Of course there were no outside beverages allowed on the boat. As we approached security, he stuffed the banana down the front of his (tight) pants. Rather than being discreet, it was obvious to the point of ridiculousness, and the bouncer spotted it immediately. “What’s that?”, he asked gruffly, pointing. “Oh I’m just pleased to see you”, said Cameron nonchalantly. The whole line cracked up. The bouncer made him pull out his banana, Cameron then asked “can I pick it up afterwards?” and the rest of us all waited in the line while they made arrangements to get the banana back.
I always value greatly my friends who make the effort to travel the world to see me. Cameron visited my homes in New Zealand, the Bahamas, San Francisco and Florida. We went to Juplaya together.
When I first met Cameron, he told me he had invested in VOIP phone booths in airports. Later I learned that his family owned large distribution warehouses near LAX, and his father lived in Bel-Air.
Cameron invested in the pre-IPO Family and Friends round of my company Urbanise, which went public in 2014. He was also a pre-IPO investor in Dixie Elixirs, a Canadian cannabis manufacturer. He co-invested with me in a couple of Harvest dispensaries in San Francisco, an investment I was forced to exit when we moved back to New Zealand in 2017. Cameron and I spent a couple of years trying to get a South American version of the Bitcoin Conference off the ground, and a crypto-mining farm down there. I sat on numerous conference calls with him, but ultimately we couldn’t reconcile the Silicon Valley “let’s do this now” attitude with the more laissez-faire approach of South American business.
More recently I had been speaking to Cameron about helping me find investors for Dynamic Experts, my A.I. startup, as he jetted around the world with DJ’s attending private parties in castles and billionaire villas. He was friends with many DJs, including Tale of Us and Claptone, frequently joining their shows in the DJ booth and staying with them afterwards.
A staunch MAGA Republican, who attended many Trump rallies including the infamous one on the Ellipse in Washington D.C. on January 6th 2021, Cameron had become disillusioned with The Powers That Shouldn’t Be and became determined to get out of the U.S. permanently. While I’m not sure if he ever fully renounced his American citizenship, I remember his party trick of pulling out all of his various forms of official government identification – Uruguay, Paraguay, Panama, Portugal, and more. He was one of the very few people in my life I speak to on the phone, we would have long calls talking about conspiracies. He was a dedicated researcher, even meeting Del Bigtree and Robert Malone in the COVID aftermath. He loved to get his friends onto guest lists; at one Bitcoin conference in Miami I met Justin Trudeau’s half-brother at a packed RFK Jr afterparty.
Cameron spread light and joy wherever he went. He loved to make friends with strangers at raves, and his costumes and accessories always seemed designed to facilitate that. One elaborate costume earned him the nickname amongst our crew “twitchy feathers”. He was the quintessential Burner, always bearing many gifts. In my family he was known as “Uncle Cameron”.
Talk to SudoCameron
A SudoTwin is an AI version of a real person, built from their own voice and words. It’s what my company makes. Cameron had asked me for one of his own, to help him explain it to people, and I agreed to make it the next time we caught up. But he was in Miami for the World Cup and too busy to see me, so we never got to it.
So I have made it now. SudoCameron is built from years of Cameron’s voice notes, messages, emails, photos and videos, and it speaks in his voice. It is an AI, not Cameron, and it will get some things wrong. What it can do is listen, remember, and keep all of our stories about him in one place.
SudoCameron remembers each person who talks to it, by phone number or by email address, so you can come back and pick up where you left off. Everything people share goes into one collective memory, and when it retells a story it says who told it. Conversations are recorded, because the purpose is to remember. If you don’t want yours kept, ask for a private conversation.
To share your memories with Cameron, press the button below, or call (424) 722-8577 from any phone. On the website you will get a link by email to sign in. On the phone it will ask for your email address, so it can send you a transcript. Tell it who you are and how you knew him, then tell your stories: how you met, the trips, the nights you only half remember, the things he said that you still repeat.
Share your memories of Cameron
This is an ever-growing scrapbook of Cameron. Press SHARE to add your own photos, videos and stories of him. Each one is checked by a person before it appears, and the scrapbook then plays the whole collection in random order. You can go forward and back, like, comment and share.
The adventures of Dispatch
Cameron Burg first went to Burning Man in 2010, when, as he liked to point out, the Man stood five stories tall. He went on to burn for twelve years, signed his emails “Dispatch,” camped one year with Mayan Warrior, and described himself as “sort of a co-editor” of Burners.me. He loved the playa and had no patience for the people who ran it, whom he called the Borg. In 2016 he threw a Make Burning Man Great Again party, complete with red hats and a Trump piñata, and people freaked out. He also kept a Burners for Bernie T-shirt.
In 2024 he went to AfrikaBurn, decided it was “more authentic” than the big one, and knelt in a feather headdress and white sequined blazer to offer his bride a flower in a Sacred Union, with a certificate to prove it. “Meet Mrs. Burg,” he wrote.
He turned up all over the world, usually in sequins.
He spent years in Uruguay before making his home in Lisbon.
In 2014 he studied with shamans in Guatemala and kept a week of silence, a remarkable feat for a man who would later send seven-minute voice notes because he didn’t like typing. In January 2025 he sailed to Antarctica on a nine-day cruise with DJs: “We are doing a rave on antartica with penguins. I am going to test flat earth theory.”
He spent Halloween 2024 at Dracula’s castle in Transylvania in a silver rabbit-eared mask and green sequined trousers.
He wore an Ivan Drago tracksuit to an 80s party in Whistler, danced at the Sphere in Las Vegas in a sequined jacket, ran into one of the Robot Heart guys in Petra, and decided on a visit to Malta that “I was a Knight of Malta a thousand years ago.”
After one summer he reported, “Ibiza kicked me off the island and revoked my license to party.” It didn’t take. He kept going back.
He saw in his last New Year, the eve of his birthday, in Jericoacoara, Brazil, where five Burning Man camps had joined forces on the beach. “Its like Tulum here before tulum became lame.”
He was very funny. On the Jameson Distillery tour in Dublin he raised his hand and asked the guide about the founder’s granddaughter, Jenna. The guide never got it. He brought a stash of rubber duckies to Zurich’s Street Parade to tease the owner of the Disco Duck art car. For more than a decade he maintained that the Cheesecake Factory was the ideal first date. At school he was asked to move on because he and the dean’s son were having too good a time and the dean couldn’t very well expel his own kid, which is how he landed at Spanish River.
He collected people. He got his friends backstage and introduced everyone to everyone. As Steve Outtrim once put it, “this is Cameron, he know a lot of DJs.” When friends were going through a divorce or a breakup, they called him. “It’s a blessing and a curse that people feel solace and comfort with me,” he said, and he took the call. He ended his voice notes with “Stay in the flow.”
By early April 2026 he was home in Lisbon after three months away, with photos from an Alpine terrace showing him in a rhinestone bucket hat and a panda-faced camera necklace, champagne in hand.
In June he was in the States, moving between Miami, Austin and New York and passing judgment on Uruguay at the World Cup: “We suck.”
Along the way, a cough he picked up in the smoke and fog of an Ibiza club would not go away. Back in Portugal in July he went to the hospital expecting a prescription and was admitted with pneumonia for three days. He came out feeling great, then relapsed two weeks later. He went to a wedding in Italy anyway, reasoning that he could always abort mission. A friend gave him a ticket to the Iceland eclipse in August, and he went to camp in the cold air for the good of his lungs. He didn’t party. He said he just wanted to see the eclipse, and he left Iceland feeling amazing. He spent the rest of the month on what he called his coolcation in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and got back to Lisbon around September 7, doing really well.
In mid-October it turned again. He had not been out drinking in four months and was trying to let his body heal, but he began having fainting spells, and a fall left him with what he described as a kind of concussion. He told Steve he hoped to be better in a month and thought he might go up to a healing forest. He kept sending jokes and reels. The last one arrived on October 27.
In a 2024 email he wrote, “its good that I have 9 lives.” He signed it “L’Chaim.”
