Philip Anschutz owns the festival’s parent company, AEG Live.

Following this week’s lineup announcement that includes Radiohead, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar as headliners, Coachella is in the spotlight again. As reported by CoS, festival owner Philip Anschutz has been exposed as a major financial supporter of anti-LGBTQ organisations and groups denying climate change science.

Anschutz – who is the head of AEG Live, the global entertainment company that owns California’s Coachella festival and operates the O2 arena in London – has donated to groups including Alliance Defending Freedom, National Christian Foundation and Family Research Council, reports assembled by Afropunk and Uproxx reveal.

Since 2008, the Anschutz Foundation has donated $175,000 to the Mission America Foundation – helmed by a president who believes homosexuality to be a “deviance” – while Anschutz also supports anti-gay legislation including Colorado’s Amendment 2.

Anschutz also has financial ties to the Koch brothers, the oil and gas billionaires who have pumped huge amounts of money into funding climate change denial, and is a financier of climate science denial groups. He has also backed anti-union organizations as well as think tanks challenging evolutionary science.

FACT has reached out to a Coachella representative for comment.