In case you missed the disastrous experience the first time, it’s clear people still want to see what Fyre Fest was like — as Billy McFarland’s 2.0 return of the event allegedly sold-out of the pre-sale tickets almost instantly.
There’s still no lineup or no clear details about what Fyre Fest 2.0 will hold, but the “First 100” of the passes opened up to the public for $499, according to a new interview he did with TMZ.
“They sold out very very quickly,” he said.
For those who don’t remember, McFarland was recently released from prison after the failings of the fest’s first run. He also had to pay millions back to investors, after the original festival went horribly wrong. There were even viral scenes of those attending struggling on the island, which sparked a few documentaries.
This time, he has promised that it will take place somewhere in the Caribbean at the end of 2024. The rest of the Fyre Fest 2.0 tickets, if anyone was sad they didn’t get them the first time, will go back on sale at a later date. However, some of the higher ticket tiers reportedly reach above $7000.
McFarland has also teased that he has plans for a Broadway musical as well, so the general public should probably take his ideas as far-fetched by now.
So, if you feel like getting stranded at a festival with no performers and limited supplies just for a viral moment, definitely keep an eye out for the next Fyre Fest 2.0 ticket drop.
Billy McFarland, who found himself fresh out of prison last year following his disastrous Fyre Festival scam, has teased that he has a bunch of new projects in the works.
Over the past few months, he’s promoted everything from a scavenger hunt for a brand new music festival to doing a 2.0 iteration of the one that went horribly wrong. He’s even thrown out wanting to box Ja Rule for money.
Now, McFarland’s next potential venture is a completely new frontier and possibly, the most far-fetched one so far: Broadway.
That’s right. He’s planning to take over Times Square with a potential musical centered around Fyre Fest’s story, according to a new TikTok appearance. He broke the news through his own video and another interview.
“Instead of like traditional Broadway actors, it’s going to be current music artists, combined with the Broadway format of the play — making fun of me, but also I think sharing some of the good sides as well,” McFarland said.
He also revealed that financial supporters are helping him pay off the first Fyre Fest — and that some unnamed musicians are still interested in coming back to play on a different island. (The 2.0 version will not be held in the Bahamas.)
”The reaction for getting artists has been so extreme,” McFarland added. “Really, like half of them are like, f*ck off, how dare you can call us. And they’re half — like, literally after I tweeted that Fyre Fest 2.0 is happening, they’ve been texting, emailing, saying, ‘Hey, like what can we do to come.’”
Because of this, it also could lead to some interesting musical numbers like “How Can You Fix The Water Problem?” and “Hadid-n’t Go So Well.” Maybe even some appearances from the musicians who were also on the original lineup could happen as well.
Twitter exploded when the infamous Billy McFarland announced Fyre Festival 2. McFarland recently tweeted he is working on a second iteration of the first disastrous event. The failed business mogul was at the center of a scandal in 2017. He promised a luxury music festival on Pablo Escobar’s rumored former private island in the Bahamas but had to relocate to Great Exuma island within weeks of the festival.
It was slated for the weekends of April 28-30 and May 5-7 of that year. Unfortunately, it was a notorious disaster due to many issues. McFarland announced the sequel to the catastrophe—less in the style of a teaser and more in the form of an outright guarantee. Can he really pull it off with such a massive failure under his belt?
Fyre Fest Controversy
McFarland, rapper Ja Rule, and promoters advertised Fyre Festival as a luxurious music event on Norman’s Cay in The Bahamas. Prominent social media influencers like Kendall Jenner and supermodels Hailey Baldwin and Bella Hadid endorsed the festival. Organizers promised high-end accommodations, extravagant meals, and performances by popular artists like Blink-182 and Migos. Promoters advertised it as an “immersive music festival.” However, upon arrival, chaos met excited festival-goers, and they quickly realized their promised music fantasy was closer to a tragedy.
How Bad Was It?
Music fans eagerly paid upwards of $1,595 for tickets to Fyre Fest. However, when they arrived on the island, attendees quickly discovered that accommodations were far from what the promoters pledged. Instead of the deluxe large private cabanas on the beach for housing, guests slept in dome-shaped flimsy half-built tents that resembled FEMA shelters.
Unfortunately, the sleeping arrangements were the least of the worries for the festival goers. All the drinking water did not clear customs, so hydration was in very short supply. There was a minimal supply of toilets, which were unusable after a few hours. Once the disaster hit social media, most headlining bands dropped out or confirmed they had never finalized agreements to perform. The lack of necessities and security caused overwhelming chaos and confusion. Additionally, many guests became trapped on the island as airlines canceled several flights back to the States.
McFarland’s Incarceration
April was stronger for restitution. I paid $8,584.53 this month, bringing the totals since my 8/30 release to:
-Restitution – $38,482 -Bahamas – $2,273
I will be posting monthly updates until everyone is paid.
After the unbelievable ghastly calamity, co-founder Billy McFarland faced a myriad of lawsuits. The charges ranged from defrauding investors, overstating financial information, and wire fraud. On October 11, 2018, the judge sentenced him to six years in prison. He only ended up serving four years.
While incarcerated, McFarland apologized for his actions and expressed his regrets. However, he continued profiting from the debacle with his podcast Dumpster Fyre. Co-founder Ja Rule did not receive any charges but faced numerous lawsuits. The courts released McFarland from prison in 2022 and fined him $26 million. He vowed to find a way to repay the investors he owed.
Despite the disastrous outcome of the original festival in 2017, Billy McFarland has announced plans for a sequel event. In a recent tweet posted on Sunday, April 9, McFarland declared, “Fyre Festival II is finally happening. Tell me why you should be invited.” Many Twitter users expressed criticism, disbelief, and outrage at the idea. One user even responded, “Tell me why you shouldn’t be in jail.” McFarland tweeted back, “It’s in the best interest of those I owe for me to be working. People aren’t getting paid back if I sit on the couch and watch tv. and because I served my time.”
McFarland also reportedly contacted 50 Cent via Twitter the first week of April. He tweeted, “Hey @50cent wanna chat?” hoping to secure him as a headliner. The response from 50 Cent remains unknown. Details are scant past that, with a timeline for the festival and whether or not any musical guests are interested in attaching their names to it currently unclear.
Disputes With The Bahamas
It’s worth noting that this announcement comes on the heels of another McFarland apology. He apologized for a recent treasure-hunting scheme in the Bahamas named PYRT. McFarland stated, “I was completely wrong, and I wholly regret my actions.” Given the disastrous outcome of the first Fyre Festival, many are skeptical about the success of this event. Some wonder if Billy Mcfarland has learned his lesson from the first Fyre Festival thrashing. Additionally, there are concerns about whether Mcfarland will prioritize the safety and comfort of attendees over profit. Only time will tell if his promises will materialize into a successful event or if it will become another cautionary tale for event organizers.
Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland has been back in the public eye recently. McFarland, who was released from prison last year, let attendees down with his failed festival, but he also left local workers hanging, who didn’t get the payment they deserved for their contributions to the event. Now, though, McFarland is cooking up a plan to get them their money, and it involves getting in the boxing ring with Ja Rule.
On the April 28 episode of the Off The Record podcast, McFarland chats with host DJ Akademiks. At one point during the conversation, McFarland took a FaceTime call with an associate, who spoke about a potential boxing match between McFarland and Ja Rule. Somebody is apparently willing to pay $350,000 to make a “15-minute” fight between the two happen, which McFarland said would “get every worker in the Bahamas paid back in full,” with neither McFarland or Ja Rule receiving any payment themselves.
As for how that bout would go, McFarland said, “He’ll probably beat me, like 80-percent chance he wins, and that’s fine.”
McFarland, meanwhile, is working on launching another music festival. He explained, “It’s in the best interest of those I owe for me to be working. People aren’t getting paid back if I sit on the couch and watch tv.”
Check out the podcast clip above and listen to the full Off The Record episode here.
Yesterday, Billy McFarland announced that he’d be returning with a Fyre Festival II, shortly after being released from prison for what occurred during the first one.
For those who don’t recall or hadn’t heard of the first one, McFarland attempted to host a music festival on an island, using celebrity endorsements to sell tickets. (He paid Kendall Jenner $250,000 to reportedly post about it, as just one example.) However, as guests arrived, it was more like a scene out of Lost, rather than a luxurious event. The artists on the lineup, including Blink-182, Migos, and more, had already canceled their appearances.
The disastrous attempt cost investors $26 million and earned McFarland a six-year prison sentence, of which he served about four.
When asked why in the world McFarland would think it was a good idea to try this again, he answered, “It’s in the best interest of those I owe for me to be working. People aren’t getting paid back if I sit on the couch and watch tv. And because I served my time.”
it’s in the best interest of those I owe for me to be working. people aren’t getting paid back if i sit on the couch and watch tv.
“I was wrong,” McFarland also said last year during a Good Morning America interview. “I messed up. I was so driven by this desperate desire to prove people right. I had these early investors, backers, employees, and I think I was just so insecure that I thought the only way to prove myself to them was to succeed and that led me down this terrible path of bad decisions.”
Late last year, he was also reportedly hosting something called PYRT (pronounced Pirate) that was supposed to be a virtual festival. But why have that when you can have a real thing?
As to who exactly would attend Fyre Fest II this time around, I guess we’ll have to see.
Blink-182 is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Billy McFarland, known as the co-creator of the disastrous Fyre Fest scam, recently completed his prison sentence. In addition to planning another business attempt, McFarland appeared on The Diary Of A CEO series (as NME notes), where the Fyre documentaries — Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud — were brought up.
He spoke about his time in prison, specifically when one of the documentaries was screened after being brought into prison on a USB stick. He said, “I literally went outside, I think I was one of two people who wasn’t in the TV room watching the documentary, but I couldn’t do it,” McFarland said. “I think I was still in the combative phase where I just hadn’t come to reality with everything that had happened and I was too scared to hear allegations or comments by the people and not be able to respond.”
“I just hadn’t come to reality with everything that happened. I was too scared to hear allegations or comments by other people and not be able to respond,” he continued. “I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, so I feel like I wasn’t stable enough or mature enough at that time to watch it, and probably still am not.”
McFarland’s upcoming PYRT (pronounced “Pirate”) business venture will be seemingly hosted in the Bahamas for a “handful of artists, content creators, entrepreneurs and any of you guys who end up joining the PYRT crew,” according to his TikTok. Just in case anyone still has Fyre Fest FOMO.
For the past few years now, Billy McFarland has been in prison. If the name’s not ringing a bell, he’s the guy behind the infamously disastrous Fyre Festival that led to him being convicted of fraud. In October 2018, he was sentenced to six years in prison. However, McFarland actually managed to get out of custody sooner than that.
NBC News reported yesterday that on March 30, McFarland was transferred to a low-security federal prison in Michigan before being placed in a New York City halfway house on May 18, according to the Bureau Of Prisons. He’s expected to stay there until August.
McFarland previously claimed that his poor Fyre Fest decisions were caused by mental illness: In 2018, before McFarland was sentenced, his lawyer wrote in a letter to US District Judge Naomi Buchwald, “Nothing in this case speaks to any malicious intent on his part. Just a sea of bad judgment, poor decisions, and the type of core instability that can only be explained by mental illness.” The letter also said McFarland has “delusional beliefs of having special and unique talents that will lead to fame and fortune.”
updates: FYRE Festival is happening!!
