While the festival is flourishing, its financial structure is changing. Mr. Harvey announced several months ago that he and his partners were planning to liquidate their ownership interests in Burning Man. As part of a three-year plan, the company’s six owners plan to cash out their stakes, then hand control of the festival to a new nonprofit called the Burning Man Project, where they will constitute the minority on a 17-member board.

That new group will run the festival, encourage Burning Man-style creativity worldwide and develop urban revitalization projects around the Central Market Street corridor of San Francisco, where the company opened new offices in May. It will also work with existing entities such as Burners Without Borders, a disaster relief group.

“We’re going to treat Burning Man like what it always should have been: not as a commodity, but as a gift,” Mr. Harvey said, explaining the festival’s multiyear transition strategy during an April 1 speech in San Francisco. Before handing Burning Man over to the new nonprofit, he added, the company’s owners will take an undisclosed payout. And this is where things get complicated. For the past decade, Mr. Harvey has stated on the festival’s Web site that if any one of the company’s owners decides to leave, “he or she will receive, as sole compensation for many years of service, a golden parachute of $20,000. Their share will then revert back to the group.”

“We have annihilated equity,” the statement adds. “Millions of dollars may stream into Burning Man each year, and millions may flow out, but Burning Man is not for sale.” To bolster this claim, the Web site also includes that statement of the company’s annual expenses.

(These financial reports are limited in scope, however, and do not include fine-print details, such as one that Mr. Harvey revealed in a recent interview: Burning Man lost a chunk of its nest egg in the market crash of 2008. “We won’t do that again; we’re not going to play the stock market," he said ruefully.)

The original $20,000 payout figure, Mr. Harvey concedes, was largely symbolic. “It was just to make a point that we weren’t in it for the money,” he said in an interview this month. And though the $20,000 figure is written into a formal company agreement, it referred to what individual owners could receive for leaving the partnership. In this case — with everyone leaving at once and dissolving the company, that provision is moot.

THOUGH the new payout is larger, Mr. Harvey said, it won’t make him and his partners rich. And certainly, the partners show little sign of courting a lavish lifestyle. Mr. Harvey, for one, lives in a modest rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco.