It’s the sequel nobody requested for: Fyre Festival II.
Billy McFarland, the fraudster creator of the notorious failed Fyre Festival, is as soon as once more viral — this time for claims {that a} second Fyre Festival is at the moment within the works.
“Fyre Festival II is finally happening,” McFarland wrote in a tweet on Sunday. “Tell me why you should be invited.”
McFarland, who was jailed after he pleaded responsible in 2018 to defrauding about 80 pageant buyers, didn’t present extra data.
Despite McFarland’s callout, which has been seen 2.3 million occasions, social media customers aren’t clamouring to be added to a visitor record. Most replied to McFarland’s tweets with memes and skepticism, referencing the unique pageant’s lack of meals and water and poor situations.
“Tell me why you shouldn’t be in jail,” one person replied.
McFarland was launched from jail in March 2022 after serving almost 4 years of his six-year sentence.
“It’s in the best interest of those I owe for me to be working,” he wrote. “People aren’t getting paid back if i [sic] sit on the couch and watch tv.
“And because i [sic] served my time.”
“I’ll show up with 100 crates full of bananas,” one other Twitter person replied. “No one will go hungry this time around.”
McFarland jokingly replied that he was “looping in” Andy King, a former Fyre Festival producer. King grew to become a meme when he appeared within the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and mentioned he had been prepared to supply oral intercourse in change for water after customs seized Evian reserves en path to Fyre Festival within the Bahamas.
King even tweeted about Fyre Festival II himself, writing, “FYRE Festival 2.0. Who’s in?? Let’s go.”
It shouldn’t be but clear if King is concerned within the Fyre Festival resurgence.
Chris Bakke, founding father of the tech agency Laskie, tweeted a screenshot of a direct message allegedly from McFarland.
“Want to come to Fyre Fest II?” McFarland wrote to Bakke. “I mean sh—posters are the new supermodels. Want to join?”
McFarland replied to Bakke’s tweet, writing, “Going to crush the island version first, but @elonmusk Fyre 3 definitely needs to be in space.”
The first time round, the one factor Fyre Festival crushed was individuals’s spirits.
Originally marketed as a two-weekend-long, luxurious music pageant on the island of Great Exuma within the Bahamas, Fyre Festival and McFarland had been outed as frauds when festivalgoers had been met with lower than appropriate situations in 2017.
The 5,000 ticketholders had been instructed the entire pageant’s headlining musicians had already pulled out of the lineup. The gourmand meals they’d been promised became below-subpar cheese sandwiches and the posh lodging was revealed to be FEMA catastrophe tents.
The pageant was co-founded and marketed by rapper Ja Rule, who had influencers like Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Bieber promote the occasion. (Ja Rule later mentioned he was additionally scammed by McFarland and was subsequently dismissed from a US$100-million class-action lawsuit.)
As a part of his 2018 jail sentence, McFarland was ordered to pay again the US$26 million he’d defrauded from buyers.
In March, McFarland tweeted about his plan to return the cash.
“Here’s how I’m going to pay it back: I spend half my time filming TV shows. The other half, I focus on what I’m really, really good at,” he wrote. “I’m the best at coming up with wild creative, getting talent together, and delivering the moment.”
He connected his cellphone quantity and inspired individuals to textual content him.
Since his jail launch, McFarland has began a brand new Bahamas-based enterprise, PYRT, pronounced “pirate.” In a November 2022 look on the Full Send podcast, McFarland mentioned the corporate is “going to be a small, permanent hotel in the Bahamas for artists and entrepreneurs to come and partake in these crazy adventures.” One such loopy journey is seemingly a treasure hunt wherein individuals seek for one among 99 bottles containing a secret message.
In the identical podcast look, McFarland additionally pitched a PYRT pageant.
“So, I have to do a PYRT fest, right? It can’t be tomorrow, it can’t be in four months, but there’s going to be PYRT fest,” he mentioned.
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