{"id":2377995,"date":"2026-04-17T18:38:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T18:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2377995"},"modified":"2026-04-17T18:38:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T18:38:17","slug":"at-coachella-everyone-is-an-influencer-even-your-uber-driver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/at-coachella-everyone-is-an-influencer-even-your-uber-driver\/","title":{"rendered":"At Coachella, everyone is an influencer. Even your Uber driver."},"content":{"rendered":"

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INDIO, Calif. \u2014\u00a0Our most unexpected brush with the ubiquity of influencer culture at Coachella came in our Uber ride to a party. \u201cAre there food influencers?\u201d our driver, John, asks as we sit in heavy traffic on Saturday afternoon. \u201cTell me if I have what it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The middle-aged Coachella Valley resident swipes out of the navigation app on his phone and opens his camera roll, scrolling to a video where he narrates his trip to a sandwich restaurant. It\u2019s a good video. He might as well be a food influencer already.<\/p>\n

The storied music festival has gotten a bad rap in recent years for being less about the music and more about turning into a carnival for influencers, who compete to capture the best displays of beauty and wealth to feed their viewers at home. Never mind that every year, people also go massively viral<\/a> for hating every second that wealthy festivalgoers take over their feeds.<\/p>\n

Has a music festival that started out as a bastion of the counterculture<\/a> really evolved into an influencer work event? Well, yes. Because even if you aren\u2019t a full-time influencer here on a sponsored stay attending invite-only parties\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0if your day job is, say, in retail or Uber driving \u2014\u00a0you clock into the content mines the second that Ferris wheel becomes visible against the dusty, rolling hills on the horizon. Who wouldn\u2019t want to go viral, get a little famous, or at least cosplay as a luxury content creator for the weekend?\u00a0 At Coachella, we\u2019re all influencers.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s better to seize the opportunity while you still can\u2014\u00a0the bacchanal might not last forever. Despite the lucrative brand deals still on offer, audiences are growing increasingly weary and bitter<\/a> about the bread and circuses in times of economic turmoil. It could all go south at any moment, so influencers might as well get in while the getting\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

I descended on the festival for a whirlwind 48 hours with Krista Rados, my colleague and social media producer, a Californian whose history as a backpacker made her the perfect safari guide for our excursion.<\/p>\n

Inside the influencer zoo\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Mona Molayem, a luxury travel influencer, has been to Coachella 18 times. She\u2019s seen firsthand how the festival has evolved from being \u201csolely about the music\u201d to \u201ca full lifestyle weekend made for social media.\u201d If you can manage your expectations about crowds, lines, prices and heat \u2014\u00a0she recommends going later in the day, leaving before the headliner finishes performing and locating non-port-o-potty bathrooms \u2014\u00a0it can be worth it to stay on festival grounds. That just wasn\u2019t her scene this year.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI myself am guilty of skipping the festival altogether and just attending the parties.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>

Mona Molayem, luxury travel influencer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI myself am guilty of skipping the festival altogether and just attending the parties,\u201d she tells Yahoo. She was planning to go to Coachella\u2019s chiller country sister, Stagecoach, until she received a few invites that included free food, drinks, experiences, gifts and performances for free. That compelled her to drive out to the desert last-minute to attend the special events in Coachella\u2019s orbit, just like us.<\/p>\n

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John the Uber driver asks if we\u2019re going to the Khlo\u00e9 Kardashian party \u2014 unclear if he means Kendall Jenner\u2019s 818 Tequila Outpost or Kourtney Kardashian\u2019s Camp Poosh \u2014\u00a0but we had tried and failed to get into both (Khlo\u00e9 was, in fact, absent this year). The Kardashians, the longstanding beacons of American consumerism and beauty, have become the unofficial mascots of Coachella.<\/p>\n

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