Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and gird yourself for the investment opportunity of a lifetime! Do you love music? Culture? Notoriety? Do you thrive on the sort of relentless negative public opinion that would drive most sane people into a permanent state of hiding? Do you remain awake at night, salivating at the prospect of being remembered for all eternity as one of the most brazen hucksters ever to walk the earth? Then does Billy McFarland have a deal for you!
As of last month, the Fyre Festival is officially for sale. In a statement released to Instagram in text too small to comfortably read, its founder, McFarland, said that the entire brand, “including its trademarks, IP, digital assets, media reach, and cultural capital,” is up for grabs “to an operator that can fully realize its vision.” And this was clearly the opportunity of a lifetime, since “FYRE is one of the most powerful attention engines in the world.”
If for nothing else, you have to applaud the careful choice of words. Technically, McFarland isn’t incorrect; the Fyre Festival certainly does attract a lot of attention. But the same could be said for World War II, the coronavirus, and Kanye West (and you’d be hard-pressed to find many people willing to invest in him at the moment).
And so it is with the Fyre Festival. First and foremost, this is an event best known for not really existing. Devised with rapper Ja Rule in 2016, the first edition was promoted as a luxury event, bringing together the biggest names in music, food from well-known chefs, and sumptuous accommodations in the form of geodesic domes. Tickets cost $12,000. Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski were paid to promote it.
Chances are you’ve seen the phalanx of documentaries about what actually happened. Sodden bedding. Emergency tents. No big-name acts. Slices of bread in polystyrene boxes. At one point, McFarland and the organizers were so desperate to distribute water to the attendees that one organizer went to the head of customs, who was holding their trucks full of Evian water, fully expecting to perform fellatio to get what people needed. As a result of the mess, McFarland was hit with more than a dozen lawsuits for many millions of dollars, an F.B.I. fraud investigation, and a six-year jail sentence. (He was released early, in 2022, after serving four years.)
Nevertheless, in 2023, McFarland announced that Fyre Festival II was happening, and that this time it would be bigger than ever. He put 100 tickets up for sale for $499 each, even though there were no dates, acts, or location. By this February, things had progressed to the point where McFarland could offer concrete details. The festival would happen in May on the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres, and tickets this time would cost up to $1.1 million. And this would have been a turnaround for the books were it not for the fact that upon looking up the event’s G.P.S. coordinates, The New York Times discovered it was apparently happening in the middle of the sea. And then the local government of Isla Mujeres denied knowing anything about it, and everything went quiet.
And now the rights to the Fyre Festival can be yours. In one sense, this isn’t an entirely stupid proposition. After all, you could put on the worst festival possible and so long as nobody has to offer sex acts in exchange for basic hydration, it will still qualify as the most successful Fyre Festival of all time.
One potential snag is the asking price. Given that McFarland currently owes $26 million to the people he defrauded with the first festival, there’s a chance that the fees for Fyre might be a little on the steep side. But, hey, if you really want to honor the spirit of the original, you could just take the name without paying for it. McFarland would surely approve.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)