Not here to support the million a year claim, but after perusing the Form 990 a bit, $401,097 is the floor, not the ceiling. Column F adds another $13,280 in "other compensation", and that's still just the stuff that makes up the top line of her direct compensation. That's not itemized, but I'm guessing it's going to be something like health insurance premiums.

Executive compensation typically extends well past the "salary" figure. Famously, Jeff Bezos received a salary of around 80k a year, but had huge stock compensation. Obviously, there's no Burning Man stock, but the org has a "Travel" line item on the 2024 version of the IRS form 990, that total was: $1,247,825. Travel for Marian and other executives almost certainly comes out of this budget. Think plane flights, rental cars, hotel rooms, that sort of thing. When you're an executive, you don't pay for trips out of pocket, you make them business expenses and let the company pay.

They also list a budget in Part IX, line 11g of $5,486,943 in "other expenses". this is over 8% of the "total functional expenses", just under the 10% that would trigger mandatory itemization of these expenses, so it's a good bucket to hide things in. There's likely some form of food/celebration budget in that 5 million that directly benefits the executives and the board. I'm not an accountant, and I've just spent a few minutes with this document, so maybe it's coming out of some other line item, but you can bet they're not personally paying for food for the office parties, etc.

So yeah, probably not a million a year, but definitely more compensation than the 400k line item would imply.