Billy McFarland, the fraudster who brought you Fyre Festival, has sold the rights to the brand on eBay for $245,300. We do not yet know who the buyer is or what they plan to do with such cursed IP.
Fyre Festival was a downright disaster. What was supposed to be a luxury music festival ended up stranding guests on an island in the Bahamas. Instead of lavish villas and gourmet meals, the festival’s clientele, which included wealthy millennial influencers, got flimsy tents and famously unappetizing cheese sandwiches.
McFarland was later convicted of financial crimes due to his role in the festival, serving about three and a half years before he was released in 2022. But McFarland has not seemed to have learned his lesson. He tried organizing a second Fyre Festival, which was supposed to take place this summer in Mexico with tickets ranging between $1,400 and $1.1 million.
The second Fyre Festival never happened. Playa del Carmen, the Mexican city where McFarland said the festival would take place, claimed that there had not been any record of planning for the event, which did not have a permit. McFarland denied this, but announced a few weeks later that he would sell the Fyre Festival brand.
“Since 2017, FYRE has dominated headlines, documentaries, and conversations as one of the world’s most talked-about music festivals,” McFarland wrote, failing to mention that the festival garnered so much attention due to its colossal failure. “There is a clear path for operators and entrepreneurs with strong domain expertise to build FYRE into a global force in entertainment, media, fashion, CPG, and more.”
The eBay auction says that a portion of the proceeds of the sale will go toward restitution — but McFarland owes $26 million, so this $245,300 sale isn’t going to make much of an impact.