Airlifting in the CEO Bitches

Last week we highlighted Business Insider’s coverage of Burning Man, talking about how a home-seizing hedge fund guru used a private aircraft charter to bring in ingredients for French Toast on the Playa, wanting to outdo some pancakes he’d seen.

Well, it seems the need of billionaires to feed us Burners is a new trend on the upswing. The Huffington Post reports on what I thought was just a Playa rumor: that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flew in by helicopter to Burning Man for just one day, in order to help give out grilled cheese sandwiches. And presumably to enjoy the sight of people worshipping at the giant Like sculpture, which was obviously just a coincidence and couldn’t possibly be related.

The people behind the anti-establishment festival Burning Man have pledged to“always burn the man.” On Friday we learned that The Man himself helicoptered in to last year’s festival… and he made sandwiches.

Mark Zuckerberg flew in to spend a day at Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s camp last year, Moskovitz confirmed in a post published Friday on blogging platform Medium and first reported by The Verge. The Facebook CEO helped pitch a tent, gave out some grilled cheese sandwiches, and helicoptered away.

“I wanted him to experience the city and to experience gifting because I thought it would make him grow as a person and the world better off as a result; I believe that’s exactly what happened, however marginally (he was already a pretty great person),” Moskowitz writes. “I’ve seen this occur countless times.”

Gifting, a Burning Man ritual, refers to anything that is given to someone else without expectation of anything in return. A gift can be anything from a hug to a glass of water, meant to “break the commerce paradigm.”

A whole lot of tech’s biggest names are regulars at the annual (occasionally drug-fueled) festival in Nevada.

Burning Man regular Google co-founder Sergey Brin was allegedly traipsing about the desert in a silver body suit at last year’s festival.

This year, the event was overrun with Silicon Valley executives, including the notorious Winklevoss Twins, and there was even a giant statue of a Facebook “like.”Attendees were encouraged to “worship” at the statue before it was burned at the end of the week.

One of the main rules at Burning Man is that no money can change hands. Everyone at the festival is expected to pitch in where they can and survive on an economy of gifting. The festival started as a free event in honor of the Summer Solstice in 1986. As time has gone on, though, ticket prices have soaredto thousands of dollars and the event has become overrun with startup guys, causing some to speculate that the festival is becoming more of a “corporate retreat” than a utopia of decommodification.

If you read the brilliant book by Ben Mezrich, Accidental Billionaires, that was later turned into the movie The Social Network, those Winklevi were looking to kick the hoodie-wearing Zuckerberg’s ass. Amazing what a $300 million dollar settlement can do. Or maybe they’re just worried about how much dirt data Facebook has on them that it’s sharing with selling to the authorities…or this guy who claims they stole from him, before Zuckerberg stole from them. Maybe all this stealing made these guys start to consider Gifting as an antidote?

Sure enough, the Giant Facebook Like god was all it took to ensure one big happy reunion on the Playa. According to the Daily Telegraph that is, who also point out that Zuckerberg actually slept in a tent and pitched it himself. I did see a Blackhawk military helicopter hovering slowly around Burning Man at one point, the only chopper I can recall this year. The altitude, high temperature, and height and proximity of the mountain ranges are an issue for aviation, as was the additional hazard this year of smoke from the third largest fires in California history. There were almost 1000 planes landing at the airport, but helicopters are a rare sight.

One of the most bitter and most celebrated feuds of the Internet age appears to have reached a form of closure with hugs in the unlikely setting of a Bohemian festival in the Nevada desert.

Amid the colourful costumes and peace signs at the annual Burning Man gathering, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the twin brother entrepreneurs who sued Facebook, had a chance encounter with the company’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. It ended, remarkably, with them becoming Facebook friends.

Moskovitz, 29, America’s youngest billionaire, co-founded the social networking website with his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg. He is worth an estimated $3 billion, and Zuckerberg an estimated $16 billion.

The Winklevoss brothers later alleged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for elements of the site from them, and were awarded a settlement worth $65 million in a long legal wrangle.

Their dispute was dramatized in the 2010 film The Social Network, in which the brothers were disparagingly referred to as the “Winklevii”.

Burning Man is a festival that promotes self-reliance and artistic expression and every year a giant human figure is burned on a dry ancient lake bed known as the playa.

In recent years it has become a popular destination for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Zuckerberg, 29, also attended and pitched his own tent in a camp set up by Moskovitz. But it appears he did not run into the 32-year-old Winklevoss brothers.

Moskovitz appeared to have mixed emotions when he first saw Facebook’s former nemeses, but concluded they had a lot in common.

“In spite of our tangled history I had never actually met them,” he wrote on a blog. “We only communicated through lawyers. These guys are among the only people on Earth I might describe as real antagonists in my life or even enemies, but on playa my first instinct was that I quite obviously needed to introduce myself and start with hugs.

“They had just arrived so I wasn’t sure how they’d react, but they were very gracious at the time and I knew they’d understand more deeply by the time they left. Almost immediately when I got back, I had a Facebook friend request from Tyler and we started a thread mutually extolling the virtues of the festival. In no uncertain terms, he described a spiritual experience.”

He added: “I had created all kinds of dark fantasies about how meeting them would go (Tyler assures me it would have been cordial regardless,) but on playa it was laughably clear. There, we were all part of the same community. We were always part of the same community.”

Mr Moskovitz, a five time veteran of the Burning Man festival, recounted the meeting as he addressed a controversy over the growing number of wealthy individuals attending.

He said the “entrepreneur invaders” would leave with a “decreased interest in zero-sum competition,” which was “great for the world.”

Mr Moskovitz, like Mr Zuckerberg, has taken a pledge to dedicate the majority of his wealth to philanthropy.

He said Mr Zuckerberg was a “guest in the camp I built,” adding: “Along with its other inhabitants, he helped pitch his own tent. I wanted him to experience the city and to experience gifting because I thought it would make him grow as a person, and the world better off as a result. I believe that’s exactly what happened, however marginally (he was already a pretty great person). I’ve seen this occur countless times.”

Billionaires lying awake at night, fantasizing about Winklevi. Pitching tents. Grilled Cheese versus French Toast, the utlimate battle of the Tech Titans.

Here’s some further commentary from Gawker, who point out that when they say “we’re all part of the same community”, does that mean we’re all Harvard alumni? And from the Verge, who think that the hippy dippy love and giving culture of Burning Man, is maybe not 100% compatible with the dog-eat-dog shark tank of Silicon Valley venture capital.

Muskovitz, who Forbes ranked as their #1 youngest billionaire above Mark Zuckerberg at #2 and company-without-a-business-model-Twitter’s Jack Dorsey at #15, lays it all out in his blog. The inner angst of a nerd, his stock options might be worth a billion and he might be saving the world through project management software, but he’s still dreaming of being “cool” enough to be a Burner.

I knowingly informed n00bs that they couldn’t wear jeans because “the costume cult people will literally yell at you with a megaphone if you do”… but my own clothes were still all wrong. My bike — and generally our entire camp infrastructure — was too new. And I decided I wanted to learn how to spin fire, because the people who did were clearly the most “authentic” group on the playa. If wealthy people are the snobby rich kids of burning man, then fire spinners are most definitely the jocks. Motherfucking fire jocks. “How can I gain credibility?”, I thought over and over. How can I become someone who belongs?

He makes a good point about radical self-reliance being a spectrum that extends infinitely. It’s a goal to be followed, a direction to pursue, not an absolute state that can actually be achieved. Whereas “radical inclusion” is supposed to mean almost everyone:

The animosity towards wealthy burners is supposedly based on the concept that they are violating the core principle of Radical Self-Reliance. People too often lose sight of the fact that this is a directional stance and not something actually achievable. Self-reliance is a fully continuous spectrum that extends in both directions forever. Did you build your camp by yourself? Did you pave the road that led to it? Did you grow your own food? Did you weld the frame of your bike? Did you raise yourself as a baby? Every burner is as radically dependent on the community as they are on themselves. When the Dislocated Hipsters came, most of them lived in RVs. Though this would be considered a cop-out by average burning man standards, it was still incredibly adventurous for them, and they learned e.g., how to start a generator and how to wash your hair with only a few ounces of water. I imagine the experience is somewhat similar for the “turnkey” folks; no matter how much assistance they get, at the very least they still need to learn how to keep themselves hydrated.

The founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, has left no room for doubt that he sees the world similarly, and all writings by core members of the org are consistent. Burning Man is for absolutely everyone. Everyone. That’s what Radical Inclusion means. If you’re a starving artist, you should go. (if you want to, of course!) If you’re a plumber, you should go. If you’re a billionaire, you should go. If you’re a Saudi Prince that can only go if a turnkey camp is provided for you, please, please come. I’ll make you a sandwich. If you believe you’re a member of the class of people who actually deserve to be there, well then Idefinitely want you to keep going. One day, you’ll get it. Elitism in all forms distracts us from the truth of our common humanity. I hope someday you will join us, and the world will be as one. 

Oh please.

[Update 8/9/13 17:29 we just heard from Mr DM himself, with some clarifications. Apparently Zuckerberg came last year, not this year like the Huffington Post (Mark Zuckerberg helicoptered into Burning Man Just For One Day), Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail and Business Insider suggested. Allvoices suggested if he DJ’d, he probably played Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Because this happened in 2012, therefore the Like could not POSSIBLY be related to Facebook in any way. The inference is, because the Like (which many Dis-Liked) was crowd-funded, it’s  not possible that any current or former employee of Facebook or Facebook shareholder could have donated to it, everything’s just lots of coincidences, unrelated, nothing to see here, move along. Ummm, YMMV – Whatsblem is trying to get an interview now for further elucidation]

“Re: your most recent snark-post  I just want to clarify that Zuck came in *2012*. The like button and the helicopter (which was intense!) you saw are unrelated. Also, you managed to spell my name wrong two different ways, which puts you just three shy of the record.”