The man behind the infamous 2017 Fyre Festival fiasco says fans are already buying tickets for its sequel as he prepares to scour the Caribbean for a venue.
Billy McFarland was jailed for four years after guests paid up to $13,000 for the promise of private jet trips, luxury villas and the chance to mingle with top stars, only to find cheese sandwiches, no bathrooms and bare mattresses in emergency tents.
He was dubbed “the poster boy for the millennial scam” after convincing influencers including Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner to promote the event, which some guests compared to The Hunger Games.
The 32-year-old said he has learned from the disaster and has begun planning his return in solitary confinement, but admits he won’t get another chance if this one fails too.
“I shouldn’t speak in absolute terms, but I will do so here.” he told the WSJ Magazine‘Fyre II has to work.’
To generate some buzz around the festival, the two paid a number of influencers and models to visit the island in December 2016.
Billy McFarland, now 33, has announced he is planning a second Fyre Festival, six years after the first ended in disaster.
Guests at the original festival were forced to wait for hours in the heat before being led into makeshift tents on an island with no running water or electricity.
The original Fyre Festival was set to run for two weekends in the spring of 2017 on a beautiful private island in the Bahamas, promising a slew of spectacular performances from a host of major artists including Blink 182 and Tyga.
The promotional material oozes luxury, with teasers showing stunning models and elite influencers partying together on white sand beaches and frolicking in the crystal-clear ocean.
Social media influencers joined in, with more than 8,000 people shelling out thousands of dollars for tickets.
But performers pulled out after failing to receive payment, while guests were forced to wait for hours in the heat before being herded into makeshift tents on an island with no running water or electricity.
McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to repay $26 million to his investors in 2018 after being convicted of fraud in federal court, while 277 guests received settlements of $7,220 each in 2021.
McFarland, a New Jersey native, announced plans to return after his release from prison in 2022, and is now considering possible locations in Honduras, Belize, Turks and Caicos Islands, Jamaica and Panama.
“This is your chance to get in,” he told festival fans when tickets went on sale for as much as $8,000 last year. “This is everything I’ve been working for. Come on, fuck it.”
McFarland says he has secured backing from a production company, a talent management agency and an American festival operator, and insists he will not be in charge of logistics this time around.
The infamous cheese sandwich went viral on social media during the doomed original festival
The girls shared tons of content from the trip and the plan worked. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was talking about the event and trying to get tickets.
Filmmaker Michael Swaigen, who made the Fyre teaser video, says in the Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud: “We needed to keep it professional and get the commercial out of the shoot, even if things around us were chaotic… It was one of the most ridiculously ambitious creative treatments I’d ever seen.”
“I always had a lot of acquaintances and people around me,” she told WSJ magazine. “Now the circle is much smaller, but the relationships are definitely deeper.”
“I’m not going to be the one installing the toilets. I think it was obvious that someone else had to take care of it.”
The first 100 VIP tickets went on sale for $549.89 in August last year, and promotional events included a zero-gravity flight in upstate New York and a helicopter diving trip in Miami.
More publicity came via an amateur fight against cryptocurrency YouTuber Justin Custardo in May and a meeting with Donald Trump in Palm Beach in June.
Last year, it promised to issue all-access tickets for $1 million, but they have not yet gone on sale.
Cooper Sinkiawic, 22, a nursing student from Phoenix, was admitted to a Telegram group for VIP ticket buyers and said optimism was high when he purchased two with his girlfriend in August last year.
But he estimates that a handful of ticket buyers asked for their money back and got refunds.
“I think this is a risky bet and I think everyone hated it at first,” he told WSJ magazine.
“But in the end, I hope it’s worth it.”
McFarland admits he remains concerned about the negative reputation of the first Fyre Festival, which was chronicled in painstaking detail in the Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud and the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
One package cost $250,000 and the designer in charge of social media for the first festival recalled receiving messages from people saying they had quit their jobs and sold everything they owned to attend.
Ticket holders were told it would be a cashless festival, so they would have to add money to chip-embedded wristbands, generating an estimated $2 million just before the event.
The Fyre Festival was scheduled to take place on a private island in the Bahamas over two decadent weekends in the spring of 2017, but the promised luxury accommodations were replaced by disaster recovery tents and bare mattresses on an unfinished gravel site.
Festival-goers, mostly millennials — the event’s target audience — had shelled out thousands of dollars to attend, with a package costing a whopping $250,000.
The private and luxury transportation promised by the festival turned out to be commercial flights, school buses and shuttles.
McFarland created false transfer records and continued to take money from investors, racking up a $900,000 alcohol tax bill in the process because no one paid attention to Bahamian tax laws.
The reactions of the people who had paid hundreds and thousands of dollars, as they were transported in a yellow school bus to the unfinished site, were ones of shock and horror.
In addition to inadequate accommodation, everyone’s luggage was missing, there was very little food, and toilets and showers were almost non-existent.
McFarland admits it will be “hard” for people to trust him if the second Fyre Festival follows the same path as the first.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get other opportunities, whether it’s a marketing job, a podcast appearance, a TV show or a relationship,” she told WSJ magazine.
But he says critics will help ensure the project’s success.
“I want 90 percent of people to say, ‘This isn’t real, this is never going to happen,'” he said.
“We’re betting that the 10 percent who can afford it will say, ‘Yeah, we’ll show them.'”