Fyre Fest is back!
That’s what its jailed-for–fraud founder, Billy McFarland, has been insisting since last year, anyway.
For those not in the know, in 2017 the Fyre Festival was built and billed to be the ultimate beach party, promising attendees the chance to rub shoulders with celebrities while luxuriating on the white sandy shores of a private island.
The festival famously fell apart and failed to deliver on many of its promises. Blink 182 and Migos live on stage? Didn’t happen. Kicking it with Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and Bella Hadid under a starry Bahamas sky? Nope.
Instead, guests were left to languish in ratty tents and served up sad little cheese sandwiches in styrofoam containers.
The whole situation was such a disaster that it inspired a pair of dueling documentaries and landed the founder, McFarland, in jail on a federal fraud conviction. McFarland was ordered to pay back the $26 million he took from his investors and spent four years behind bars before he was released on probation in 2022.
Rapper Ja Rule, the festival’s co-founder, got rolled up in some of the lawsuits that followed the disaster, but he was ultimately cleared of legal wrongdoing stemming from the fest in 2019.
Back to the present: McFarland is still saying Fyre Fest II is happening. He made the announcement last April that he was going to take another dive into the festival pool, and put presale tickets on sale in August.
McFarland doesn’t know where it’ll be held, when, who is going to be there or who is performing, but he assured the Wall Street Journal that it is happening.
And it better, because the man has already sold tickets to the event.
Why someone would buy a ticket to Fyre Fest II, which at present has no selling point beyond “the sequel to the really bad festival,” is unclear. But McFarland knows that he’s got to deliver if he hopes to win any shred of trust from the public back.
The 32-year-old told the WSJ that “Fyre II has to work.”
“It’s going to be very hard to get other opportunities, whether that’s a marketing job, a podcast appearance, a TV show or a relationship,” McFarland told the paper. “People are going to be hard-pressed to trust me if I put it all on the line and fail at it twice.”
When the WSJ reporter asks McFarland what he’s got cooking so far, he unfortunately doesn’t make it too far into his spiel before saying something worthy of an eyebrow raise.
According to the story, McFarland revealed that a “production company he doesn’t want to name” has bought a 51 percent stake in the Fyre Festival’s parent company, Fyre Media. The mystery parent company will handle the finances and operations of the festival.
McFarland said the only thing he’ll personally have his hands on are the festival’s marketing and promotional events.
When asked who he’s working with and why he won’t name names, McFarland says he’s afraid his reputation might kill the project, and he wants to shield his partners from guilt by association.
“I think once they’re ready to reveal themselves and come out with marketing or dates or location, all the key information, they’re willing to take that heat. I just don’t want to prematurely throw something out there,” he said.
As for the fun stuff — entertainment — no word on that yet. McFarland suggested perhaps “Karate Combat on the beach” as well as “comedy” and “fashion.”
And no, that wasn’t a capitalization typo — Karate Combat refers to a full contact competitive karate league in which McFarland once participated. In May, McFarland beat down a crypto YouTuber named Justin Custardo during one of the league’s events and won $10,000.
But before he can hold a seaside kumite, McFarland’s got to find a place to pitch some tents.
He told the WSJ that he’s got partners scouting around potential festival sites in places like Honduras, Belize, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, and Panama, and that they started their scouting trips in July. He later amended his comment and said the scoutings trips had to be bumped to September.
The WSJ confirmed that McFarland’s team has spoken to at least one venue owner in Honduras about a possible Fyre Fest II location.
McFarland told the WSJ he knows there’ll be naysayers. But there are clearly at least 100 people who, whether ironic or not, believe in McFarland’s vision.
Ticket prices for Fyre Festival II ranged from $499 (£390) to $7,999 (£6258) when McFarland announced them last year.
“This is everything I’ve been working towards. Let’s f***ing go,” he said at the time.
He told the paper that he sold out all 100 presale VIP tickets to Fyre Fest II when they went on sale last August.
The purchases could represent a real show of faith in McFarland — if the money wasn’t all sitting in an escrow account.