Fyre Festival II now metastasizing into existence
The original Fyre Fest's co-founder, Billy McFarland, has announced another round of the infamously disastrous festival
Last week, Fyre Festival co-founder and convicted felon Billy McFarland tweeted 50 Cent a message. It read, simply, “hey @50cent wanna chat?” At the time, it appeared like nothing more than yet another of McFarland’s attempts to keep his name in circulation by posting in the general direction of his former business partner Ja Rule’s eternal enemy.
Now, with the dread knowledge that McFarland is planning another Fyre Festival, that tweet reads more ominously—like a grim portent of things to come.
After attempting to get in touch with 50, McFarland announced that “Fyre Festival II is finally happening” and, already laying out a sticky social media engagement trap, asked people to “tell me why you should be invited.”
Since then, he’s been responding to jokes about how terribly his previous grift worked out with winking posts about his former collaborators. Through his new company PYRT, which is named like a lazy start-up stereotype and presumably pronounced like a kid making armpit fart sounds, he’s also been replying to ideas for avoiding another catastrophe with in-depth notes, like one that just says: “love.”
As to what Fyre Festival II would actually be, the only hints we have to go on are McFarland messaging 50 Cent, proclaiming that “shitposters are the new supermodels,” and, as was inevitable, tagging Elon Musk to say that “Fyre 3 definitely needs to be in space.” This last point, McFarland writes, will have to wait until he “[crushes] the island version first”—presumably by rendering Earth uninhabitable and needing to take his three-ring circus to the stars.
The original Fyre Fest, of course, spawned not just lawsuits aplenty but also a cottage industry of documentaries and attempts to squeeze every last bit of juice from the diseased fruit of a swindler’s disastrous con. It only makes an awful kind of sense, then, that the ultimate form that these attempts to cash in on a notorious failure would take is another festival whose draw is that it might suck just as bad as the original.
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