Billy McFarland, the convicted fraudster behind the disastrous Fyre Festival of 2017, has announced new dates for the long-awaited follow-up to the often-mocked Bahamian influencer event that landed him in prison for four years, owing victims more than $26 million in restitution.
Earlier this week, McFarland took to the Today Show to “announce” the new dates for Fyre Fest II, which he now says will take place April 25-28 on “a private island off the Caribbean coast of Mexico.” By most counts, however, this is the third or fourth version of a sequel to the event McFarland has broadcast to his followers. McFarland has been hyping up a follow-up to the disastrous 2017 Bahamas festival since he went to prison in late 2018, changing the date for his redemption-style event several times while carefully removing or updating past references to Fyre II each time he updates his social media sites.
According to court documents, McFarland has been writing up a plan for the event — first called PYRT festival — since he was incarcerated at Elkton Federal Correctional Institute in Ohio on charges of fraud and lying to the FBI. McFarland immediately begin hawking the event on TikTok when he got out of prison in mid-2022 with a scavenger hunt. McFarland had fans looking through empty bottles by late November of that year for free tickets to an event he’d eventually rebrand as Fyre Fest II in August of 2023, where he claimed to have placed 100 tickets on sale for $499 a pop and immediately sold out of them, which would have generated nearly $50,000 in revenue.
The date for that event was scheduled for late 2024 and at one point McFarland bragged there were more people signing up for his event than buying tickets for Coachella. Besides the first 100 tickets allegedly sold to Fyre II, fans have only been able to “sign up” for tickets to the sequel event, clicking through a form-style website where they are encouraged to apply for the opportunity to buy tickets to Fyre Festival II, with prices ranging from $1,400 to $1.1 million. At this point, fans can’t buy tickets for the event — they can only apply to attend.
McFarland detailed the venture to both the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, saying that he hopes to gather about 3,000 people for the event and also promises “an incredible production company who’s handling everything from soup to nuts” for the fest.
“We have the chance to embrace this storm and really steer our ship into all the chaos that has happened, and if it’s done well, I think Fyre has a chance to be this annual festival that really takes over the festival industry,” McFarland told NBC.
McFarland has not avoided legal trouble since leaving prison. Last year he was served a civil summons, which claimed he ripped off an investor who gave him $740,000 for his new venture. An attorney for 54-year-old Jonathan Taylor of New York — who met McFarland while both were serving prison sentences at Elkton — said Taylor struck an agreement with McFarland and his business partner, Michael Falb (also named as a defendant), in which they allegedly offered him one-third equity in the venture, PYRT Technologies, in exchange for a $740,000 investment. Taylor claims McFarland and Falb then reneged on the deal by refusing to grant him the equity they promised or to return the money despite his demands that they do so. A judge later ruled that Taylor needed to refile the lawsuit to push the case forward.
McFarland has managed to stay busy with other ventures since leaving prison. In May, McFarland won a heavily hyped martial arts fight against a social media influencer, defeating the heavily favored crypto YouTuber Justin “Jchains” Custardo via TKO during the main event of Karate Combat’s Influencer Fight Club series at the Consensus conference in Austin, Texas.
McFarland has also launched the PYRT marketing agency and been heavily involved in the promotion of the song “ONBOA47RD,” a pro-Donald Trump rap song from Fivio Foreign and Kodak Black.