The world could be seeing a return of the disastrous Fyre Festival — at least according to co-founder and convicted con man Billy McFarland who teased it on Twitter on Monday.
In 2017, McFarland and co-founder Ja Rule launched a massive influencer campaign to promote Fyre Festival, a three-day ultra-exclusive party on a private island in the Bahamas that used to belong to Pablo Escobar. With tickets selling for hundreds to thousands of dollars, it promised luxury accommodation and “the best in food, art, music, and adventure.”
Except it turned out to be the biggest festival disaster ever, with guests getting stuck in the airport, arriving to meals literally made up of cheese slices on wheat loaf bread, an armada of trucks still trying to put the venue together, mattresses on the floor of rain-soaked tents, and collecting their luggage from the back of a shipping container in an unlit car park in the middle of the night.
A year later, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay back $26 million to the investors of the festival after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud. McFarland was released in March 2022, after just four years. And now, a prison sentence and two documentaries later, he’s asking people why they think they should be invited to Fyre Festival II.
Of course, his announcement was met with many jokes, with many referencing the Netflix documentary about the disaster.
After all that’s happened and what he put people through, he can’t be serious, right? It seems like he is. Responding to a commenter who asked why he isn’t in jail, McFarland said that it’s in the best interest of the people he owes for him to be working.
In an earlier tweet, he claimed that he’s best at “coming up with wild creative, getting talent together, and delivering the moment.”
It’s all still just a tease at this point. Fyre Festival producer and fan favorite on the Netflix documentary Andy King did say “let’s go” in response to McFarland’s tweet, but for now, there are no indications that a new festival is happening.
Earlier in the year, McFarland leveraged his experience promoting Fyre Festival and offered to help startups “blow up” their marketing. McFarland claimed that he got “hundreds of inbound requests” from this offer, and said in one response that he was working on the marketing of a dating app, but it’s unknown how this endeavor worked out for him. He has not been credited for any new recent viral marketing campaigns.
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