The biggest stars in the world are currently either bound for or departing from the small city of Indio, California, where the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival kicked off over the weekend and will continue through next Sunday. The festival, better known simply as \u2018Coachella,\u2019 draws annual crowds in the hundreds of thousands and gross revenues greater than $100 million, making it one of the highest-profile and most successful live music events in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sabrina Carpenter and Justin Bieber are headlining this year\u2019s festival, but musicians won\u2019t be the only A-listers strolling the Coachella Valley this month. The festival, which has grown steadily since its launch in 1999, draws big names from across the entertainment and famous-for-being-famous industries: movie stars, socialites, influencers. Coachella\u2019s footprint on social media and beyond is far greater than any rival festival. If you are anywhere within a stone\u2019s throw of 40-years-old or younger, the bright lights, garish colors, and pounding beats will almost certainly make an appearance in your algorithms at some point this week.\u00a0<\/p>\n
More than a music festival, Coachella has grown into a full-blown cultural event, an annual occurrence in the zeitgeist drawing millions of eyes to the same stage for a brief period of time.<\/p>\n
Beneath the bass, the drums, and the bubblegum pop, though, lies a truth about Coachella which casts things in a darker light: far from being an organic outgrowth of popular youth culture, the festival is one of the crown jewels in a corporate empire owned by a man who contributes significant sums of money to issues and organizations which many young festival-goers would find appalling. The money they pay for tickets, lodging, and Instagram-worthy Coachella pictures makes its way into his pockets, and then directly into a vast right-wing agenda.<\/p>\n
Coachella debuted in 1999, but its current incarnation dates back to its purchase in 2001 by the Anschutz Entertainment Group, owned by billionaire Phil Anschutz. An oil man turned railroad baron turned entertainment industry impresario, Anschutz has amassed a fortune estimated at roughly $20 billion. Today, the Anschutz Corporation is a sprawling corporate interest with subsidiaries holding controlling interests in media companies, stadiums, sports teams like the LA Galaxy and the LA Kings, music festivals like Coachella, and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite a number of his most prominent cultural properties being based in southern California, Anschutz himself is not. The billionaire is a native Kansan, but a long-time Coloradan, where he has ranked as the state\u2019s wealthiest citizen for years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anschutz was already well on his way to the title of wealthiest Coloradan by 2001 when he purchased Coachella from the original owners who had launched the festival two years before, but the deal he struck in 2001 has proven more lucrative than anyone could have expected at the time. In 2001, Anschutz Entertainment Group paid $7 million for Coachella. By 2017, the most recent year for which the company has released financial figures for the festival, gross revenue came to more than $114 million<\/a> \u2013 meaning one year of the festival pulled-in more than 16 times what Anschutz paid for it. Returns like that are hard to find.<\/p>\n Though AEG no longer releases financial information for the festival, attendance and ticket prices have both continued to climb, indicating that the 9-year-old gross revenue figure of $114 million is likely outdated and outstripped by now.<\/p>\n All of which is to say: two weekends\u2019 worth of celebrities, influencers, and ticket-holders descending on the Coachella Valley every year makes Phil Anschutz a lot of money. What he does with that money, though, should be enough to have would-be attendees rethinking their choice.<\/p>\n Never quite as wealthy or prominent as the Koch brothers, Anschutz is nevertheless made in their mold: an industrialist who commits a sizable portion of his fortune to ensuring that the government works for him, and not the other way around. And while I\u2019m sure Anschutz wouldn\u2019t balk at having the Kochs\u2019 wealth, he has never wanted the prominence: not quite reclusive, but certainly not interested in having our prying eyes in his business, the wealthiest Coloradan is often described as \u201cmedia-shy<\/a>\u201d \u2013 or at least savvy enough to understand that much of his political activity could be off-putting to the customers of his many public-facing businesses.<\/p>\n I am not the first to note the connection between Anschutz\u2019s controversial politics and his ownership of such a prominent pop-cultural property. Nearly a decade ago, his support<\/a> for anti-LGBTQ+ organizations brought a wave<\/a> of headlines<\/a> and criticism of the kind that the famously media-shy billionaire works hard to avoid. In an attempt to put the controversy behind him, Anschutz released a statement claiming he did not know about the donations to anti-LGBTQ+ orgs and would stop any future donations from being made \u2013 but that wasn\u2019t true<\/a>. Much of Anschutz\u2019s political spending has become more opaque since the controversy, but appears to follow all of the same contours as before.<\/p>\n I have dedicated a great many column inches over the years to understanding, analyzing, and dissecting Anschutz\u2019s political spending in Colorado, looking at the advocacy groups, think tanks, foundations, and other miscellaneous entities kept afloat by his largesse in exchange for advancing his interests. I have written about<\/a> his ties to Advance Colorado, the state\u2019s most prominent conservative group; I have written about his funding of the Common Sense Institute<\/a>, which helps legitimize ideas put forward by right-wing advocacy organizations, and about the role his wholly-owned media properties play in promoting the Common Sense Institute\u2019s bogus research. And I have written about how he uses this network of organizations to fight against workers\u2019 rights, against LGBTQ rights, against industrial regulations, and incessantly in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy.<\/p>\n But Anschutz\u2019s fortune is large enough to exert influence on an area greater than Colorado and, much the same way as the Kochs and better-known barons before him, his fortune is spent on national political machinations as well.<\/p>\n At the national level, Anschutz is a major donor to the Heritage Foundation<\/a>. Best known in recent years as the driving force behind Project 2025, Heritage has long been a major player on the political right, where it has led the charge on controversial fronts like climate change denialism<\/a> and opposition to equal rights<\/a> for LGBTQ+ Americans. The Heritage Foundation, with the help of Anschutz\u2019s money, has also promoted<\/a> false voter fraud conspiracy theories like the idea that Donald Trump actually won<\/a> the 2020 election. He did not.<\/p>\n Anschutz also contributes large sums to the American Enterprise Institute<\/a>, which advocates for billionaire-friendly \u201cfree market\u201d policies, and the Heartland Institute<\/a>, which is best known as the think tank which worked with<\/a> the Philip Morris Company to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about the health risks of cigarette smoke.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/media.coloradotimesrecorder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Philchella-683x1024.jpg\")
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