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 ‘Coachella,’ 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.
Sabrina Carpenter and Justin Bieber are headlining this year’s festival, but musicians won’t 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’s footprint on social media and beyond is far greater than any rival festival. If you are anywhere within a stone’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
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’s wealthiest citizen for years.
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 – meaning one year of the festival pulled in more than 16 times what Anschutz paid for it. Returns like that are hard to find.
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.
All of which is to say: two weekends’ 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.
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’m sure Anschutz wouldn’t balk at having the Kochs’ 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 “media-shy” – 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.
I am not the first to note the connection between Anschutz’s controversial politics and his ownership of such a prominent pop-cultural property. Nearly a decade ago, his support for anti-LGBTQ+ organizations brought a wave of headlines 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 – but that wasn’t true. Much of Anschutz’s political spending has become more opaque since the controversy, but appears to follow all of the same contours as before.
I have dedicated a great many column inches over the years to understanding, analyzing, and dissecting Anschutz’s 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 his ties to Advance Colorado, the state’s most prominent conservative group; I have written about his funding of the Common Sense Institute, 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’s bogus research. And I have written about how he uses this network of organizations to fight against workers’ rights, against LGBTQ rights, against industrial regulations, and incessantly in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy.
But Anschutz’s 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.
At the national level, Anschutz is a major donor to the Heritage Foundation. 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 and opposition to equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans. The Heritage Foundation, with the help of Anschutz’s money, has also promoted false voter fraud conspiracy theories like the idea that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. He did not.
Anschutz also contributes large sums to the American Enterprise Institute, which advocates for billionaire-friendly “free market” policies, and the Heartland Institute, which is best known as the think tank which worked with the Philip Morris Company to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about the health risks of cigarette smoke.
Over the years, Anschutz has also financially supported the Federalist Society, an organization that was seen as instrumental in putting five of its current or former members on the Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. These five Justices wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case which overturned the right to abortion access established by Roe v. Wade.
Not content to live out his days in greater comfort and luxury than the vast majority of humans who will ever live, not content to see his name on museums and hospitals and scholarship funds, Phil Anschutz insists on spending his fortune in a long series of attempts to force the rest of us to conform to his will. Unlike the more libertarian-minded Kochs, Anschutz does not confine his influence to the tax and regulatory issues which help pad his bottom line. He has spent millions of dollars to exert influence over who you can marry, and what you can do with your own body. He has spent untold sums trying to wind back the clock on social progress and workers rights, all while spending additional millions to prevent any action on climate change.
He has spent more money than most of us will ever see in an attempt to steer the world in a direction most of us don’t want it to go.
And next weekend, an estimated quarter of a million people will once again flock to Indio for concerts and selfies and celebrity spottings, keeping Phil Anschutz flush with cash and ready to do it all again. Just like there is no way to watch the new HBO adaptation of Harry Potter without directly contributing to J.K. Rowling’s relentless campaign against transgender people, there is no way to attend Coachella without contributing to Anschutz’s political crusades: anti-gay, anti-climate, anti-worker.
The only way to avoid conscription into a culture war you don’t believe in, then, is to not attend.
