Fyre Festival founder reveals festival’s return and sells tickets despite no location or event date
Uh oh, Fyre Festival is returning at the end of 2024.
But it’s somewhat of an overstatement to say the festival is ‘returning,’ given the inaugural Fyre Festival basically didn’t happen.
As documented by the viral Netflix documentary, Fyre Festival was a disaster on a mass scale. Hundreds of ticketholders were left stranded on a Bahamian island after the festival’s accommodation, stages and infrastructure had failed to be built in time.
Videos of festivalgoers stranded and searching for cover on the island went viral and in the years since the event in 2017, founder Billy McFarlane served time in prison on fraud charges.
He had been selling accommodation and tickets for Fyre Festival at inflated prices despite having no clear plan of how he would build the festival site. And this time around, tickets are on sale even though there is no line-up and no event date yet announced.
McFarland, whose Wikipedia page cites him as a fraudster, revealed more details about the festival’s return in a social media post.
He said: “Fyre Festival tickets are officially on sale.
“I wrote out this 50 page plan of how it would take this overall interest and demand in Fyre, and how it would take my ability to bring people from around the world together to make the impossible happen. How I would I find the best partners in the world to allow me to be me while executing Fyre’s vision to the highest level.”
McFarlane also said he had signed a deal for a Broadway show about Fyre Festival and that the second iteration of the festival would return to the Caribbean. It will return at the end of 2024 but there would be pop-ups and events “across the world” in the meantime.
Comments from social media users are typically joking about the idea of the festival’s return. One said: “Another f***ing scam? Do you want to go to jail again?”
On the newly launched Fyre Festival II website, the first 100 tickets going for $499 dollars each. A tiered ticketing system reveals tickets will be sold for as much as $7,999.