A Pennsylvania resident is now one of the largest private landowners in Hawaiʻi.
Andrew Tepper has stirred controversy for hosting an annual festival inspired by Burning Man on property zoned for agriculture. But less attention has been paid to Tepper’s recent land acquisitions on Hawaiʻi Island.
Christine Hitt is the Hawaiʻi contributing editor for the online news website SFGate. Hitt spoke with The Conversation about her reports on Tepper’s festival and land ownership.
Interview highlights
On the Falls on Fire festival
CHRISTINE HITT: Falls on Fire is marketed as a Burning Man-style event. If you're familiar with the event that happens in Nevada every year, it basically would include overnight camping, music, DJs, and then it would kind of end with a burning ceremony of an effigy, just like Burning Man. So they're hoping to make it a multi-day-long festival. So they didn't have the proper permits. This is agriculturally zoned land, so with that said, they were hit with different violations. Some neighbors complained, some didn't. I think there's a mix of opinions about the event, but now they are looking to get the proper permits. They submitted it in September for a special use permit, and that decision should be coming up shortly.
On Andrew Tepper
HITT: The first thing that I did was I kind of dug into the different land purchases. I'm not sure what his history in Hawaiʻi is, but he first comes on the scene in 2021. That's when he purchases three parcels. You got the large one that's about 13,000 acres, and then you have two smaller ones at about 1,500 [acres], and then that's about when he started planning the Burning Man-style event, Falls on Fire. Aside from that information, there isn't a whole lot out there on him, who he is, and his background, what he does. And so the only real facts that I found were looking into newspaper archives when he owned a software development company, learning that he graduated at Carnegie Mellon in Pennsylvania, he started a game development studio called eGenesis. I'm not familiar with these types of games, but they're called MMORPG games (massively multiplayer online role-playing), and one also in 2013, which was a casino that uses cryptocurrency. I also saw that he had purchased other large properties on the East Coast, including Dream Mountain Ranch in West Virginia, which is 1,100 acres. So it's kind of like looking into like, what is his history with land? What does he tend to do with the land, and kind of get a sense of maybe what his intentions are. But I did reach out to him, and he did tell me, this was through email, that he just loves agricultural land, so that's his word on why he's so interested in these parcels.
On investigating Tepper's intentions
HITT: That's what kind of prompted me into diving into it, because I was like, yeah, he owns more than [Mark] Zuckerberg. So I think that's worthwhile, kind of looking into this as a story.
HITT: I guess just like everyone else, every time someone buys a large property, there's always a question of: what is it going to be used for? What can it be used for? Could special permits be altered to include any type of development? You know, those are all these thoughts that come up. Is this event going to move forward? There's concerns like, well, what if it grows even more like Burning Man? I think there's thousands and thousands of people who go to Burning Man each year. So how will that affect the land, there, the community, there, the environment? I think there's a lot of environmental questions that I didn't get to address in the story, including, they're playing with fire, literally. So what is that going to do to the environment around it? Even if it is on about 15 acres — is what it called for in the special use permit.
This story aired on The Conversation on Dec. 2, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
