- Billy McFarland recently announced Fyre Festival 2 was happening in May 2025
- McFarland was found guilty of defrauding Fyre Festival investors out of $27.4m
- The Fyre Festival founder spent almost four years in prison for wire fraud
Billy McFarland was, between 2017-2019, a name that evoked much laughter and anger. A name attached to viral infamy through fraudulent schemes, sometime involving Ja Rule. But for the last few years, Billy McFarland discourse had gone the way of his scamtastic Fyre Festival. Consigned to history as a seemingly bewildering footnote that we had all, hopefully, learned to ignore and never be fooled by again.
Oh, if only.
Now Billy McFarland is back. Not quite in Pog form, sadly, but in actual, Fyre Festival 2 form, claiming that the sequel to 2018’s Bahamian-based calamity is happening and it’s happening very soon. With no acts confirmed and tickets costing anywhere between $1,400 and $1.1m. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, let’s take a little look at the backstory of Billy McFarland to find out just how likely it is that Fyre Festival 2 will become a success story.
Who is Billy McFarland?
McFarland, dubbed “the poster boy for millennial scamming” by Vanity Fair, was born to real estate developers Steve and Irene McFarland in New Jersey, in 1991. The 33-year-old attended Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, but dropped out in his Freshman year to found Spling – a short-lived online advertisement platform which was criticised for being too similar to other content sharing networks at the time.
Next up venture-wise for McFarland was seeded payments company Magnises, which was set up with $1.5m worth of investor funding. Around the same time, in 2013, McFarland launched Fyre Media Inc., the parent company of Fyre Festival. McFarland claimed the company was worth $90m in a term sheet sent to investors, although it was revealed the company had only done around $60,000 in business. This would serve as a pre-cursor of what was to come with Fyre Festival’s organisation. Or lack thereof.
Fyre Festival
McFarland announced Fyre Festival alongside rapper Ja Rule as a way to promote the Fyre music booking app. The pair once touched down during a flight on a private plane on the island of Norman’s Cay. The island had once belonged to former Medellin Cartel member Carlos Lehder Rivas. McFarland subsequently leased the island from the current owners as a site to host Fyre Festival, although he was given the strict condition not to make reference to the island’s cartel-related past and Pablo Escobar in any marketing materials.
So McFarland decided to falsely claim in a promotional video that the island was the former home of Pablo Escobar and the agreement with the island’s owners was promptly cancelled.
Not only that, but promotional videos and posts starring the likes of Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Kendall Jenner (who reportedly received $250,000 for a solitary post) and multiple other models and Instagram influencers were shared, many of which did not divulge that they were a paid for advertisement, breaching Instagram’s rules around advertisements and sponsored content.
Acts such as Pusha T, Tyga, Lil Yachty, Disclosure, Migos and Blink-182 were announced as part of the festival’s lineup, but then all pulled out ahead of the event, with every single facet of the organisation in ruin, from accomodation to catering to security and beyond.
Festival Cancellation and Lawsuits
McFarland continued to falsely promote the festival as happening on Pablo Escobar’s former island, when, in fact, Fyre Festival was now due to be hosted on Rokers Point on Great Exuma in the Bahamas. Neither Rokers Point or Great Exuma were luxurious, private islands, but rather, in the case of Rokers Point, a parking lot which was part of an abandoned resort development near Sandals Emerald Bay.
Festival goers were left abandoned in almost sub-human conditions when they finally arrived at Great Exuma, with tents and mattresses (left out for guests in place of the luxury villas promised, as there was neither the time nor the finances to construct them) soaked by heavy rainfall on the island. It was reported that there were insufficient toilet facilities and no running water for the guests that had made it to the festival, which was then cancelled the morning after their arrival.
McFarland was the subject of multiple lawsuits as a result of the fradulent farce. Amidst all this, McFarland and his associates were under investigation for wire fraud, mail fraud and securities fraud. McFarland would plead guilty to two cases of wire fraud, in March of 2018 in what were called schemes to defraud investors and ticket vendors. He was sentenced to six years in prison and forced to forfeit $26m in October, 2018.
Prison and Fyre Festival 2
McFarland would spend almost four years in jail in Federal Correctional Institution, Elkton in Lisbon, Ohio, before being released in March, 2022 to a halfway house until his house arrest came to an end in September of the same year.
In late 2024, McFarland confirmed in an interview with NBC that Fyre Festival 2 would in fact go ahead, in April, 2025. That date has already been pushed back to the end of May of this year, with the convicted felon explaining to TODAY that tickets were now on sale for the festival, which was being held just off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. No acts have been announced and tickets will cost between $1,400 and $1.1m.
