Vincent van Gogh once advised aspiring artists to treat their creative pursuits like a flame: “One must never let the fire go out in one’s soul,” he said, “but keep it burning.”
Billy McFarland, a felon whose so-called creative pursuits have cost victims millions of dollars, has burned down plenty along the way. His internationally mocked and infinitely memed Fyre Festival in 2017, now cultural shorthand for hubris of the elite, was a scam that sent Mr. McFarland to prison for nearly four years.
While awaiting sentencing in the Fyre Festival case, Mr. McFarland started a V.I.P. ticket service that promised users tickets he didn’t have to events like the Broadway musical “Hamilton” and the Met Gala.
In recent months, Mr. McFarland had pivoted to Fyre Festival 2, a moderately-hyped attempt at redemption. That effort — perhaps blessedly, for all who optimistically bought the exorbitantly priced tickets (ranging from $1,400 to $1.1 million) — appeared to be over before it even started. Playa del Carmen, the city in Mexico that Mr. McFarland claimed would host the event, publicly snubbed him, saying there was no record of the festival and it would not be hosted on its shores.
Now, a month before Fyre Festival 2 was supposedly set to kick off, Mr. McFarland is putting out his Fyre for good: He announced he would sell the brand and all its trappings to the highest bidder.
“This brand is bigger than any one person,” Mr. McFarland said in a statement posted to Instagram on Wednesday. “It’s clear that I need to step back and allow a new team to move forward independently.”
Why Mr. McFarland decided to abandon the brand now is unclear. The original Fyre Festival — which promised a glittering luxury beach retreat and music festival — was reduced to a global punchline when concertgoers arrived to the Caribbean venue and found none of the amenities Mr. McFarland had promised. In 2018, Mr. McFarland was sentenced to six years in federal prison for “multiple fraudulent schemes” and lying to federal investigators. He was released early in 2022, and has since emerged as a poster child for the “big-time millennial grifter.”
Nearly as soon as Mr. McFarland was released from prison, he began making plans for Fyre Festival 2, an event he promised would redeem the original, which was the subject of at least two documentaries examining its collapse.
“It was about two things,” Mr. McFarland said of the reprised festival. “Finishing what I started, and making things right.”
As the announced start date of May 30 approached, there were rumblings of trouble. The festival website announced that the event was delayed and then deleted the post. Then the city of Playa del Carmen said in a post on X that no permit had been granted for a major music festival.
Mr. McFarland’s statement did not include any information about refunds for those who had purchased tickets to Fyre Festival 2, but multiple news outlets have reported that ticket holders received refunds in recent weeks from a third-party vendor that partnered with the festival.
Now, Mr. McFarland says the entire Fyre brand is for sale — including its “cultural capital” and associated, aspirational music festival — and can become whatever a buyer needs it to be.
“Fyre is one of the most powerful attention engines in the world,” Mr. McFarland said in the post on Instagram announcing the sale.
The Fyre Festival site now contains a form to offer a bid on the brand. “What’s your offer?” one prompt reads, with a box for users to input a U.S. dollar amount.
The “merchandise” link leads to a blank, acid-green page.
