Right, and the publicity image was altered to make it look like it was.
My favorite quote from media coverage so far (from the Guardian):
On its website, Fyre was selling tickets for between $1,400 and $1.1m, with vague promises of luxury yachts, soon-to-be-confirmed headline acts and priceless experiences that could include diving with whale sharks, mixology sessions and, more credibly, survivalist challenges.
(bolding mine)
The Guardian has more details (or lack of details) on this. According to Edgar Gasca from the tourism directorate of Isla Mujeres, there has been no contact with anyone in government or any hotels listed in the Fyre announcements. A rep from one of the hotels said they have not been approached. “This festival is not going to happen,” said Gasca.
Meanwhile, Fyre organizers contacted the Guardian with the following statement:
Fyre Festival 2 has secured top-tier private venues and hotels in partnership with our local allies who have established communications with the corresponding authorities to ensure full compliance and flawless execution.
As a group, we have established contact with the municipal and state authorities to establish the certainty of a healthy event, and thus, obtained the respective official announces [sic] and collaborations that guarantee total compliance, support the local community, and offer responsibly a boutique event that raises the prestige and long-term value of the destination.
So somebody isn’t being entirely honest. Hmmm, I just can’t decide who to trust.
I love this from the website describing the Prometheus Pass ticket (the $1.1M one):
The origin of the Prometheus Pass is shrouded in secrecy. Legend has it that it was inspired by the Titan Prometheus…
You don’t say…
They want to make sure you are aware they’ve, ya know, established some things here. I mean, why would they lie??
At this point when the festival fails to happen and the people behind it are arrested and tried, I think the money should be confiscated and given to charity. If after the first festival, you bought a ticket to this one- then you deserve what you get.
There’s never any money left over anyway.
I also watched the Netflix documentary a couple of days ago. It’s a bit fluffy because it focusses on the human side and there is next to no financial detail about how the fraud was conducted.
It’s also a little misleading as - almost throughout - the doco makes it seem like it was at least possible that McFarlane was merely a wildly over-optimistic fantasist, unintentionally disconnected from reality, and who got in over his head and left himself too little time and money to pull off what he honestly intended to pull off.
It’s only at the end, for about ten seconds, where it is explained that McFarlane knew that the amount raised from sales (about $1.5M) was a tiny fraction of costs and that he had coldly mislead investors not a little bit - as a starry eyed optimist might - but by orders of magnitude ($35M).
The doco also doesn’t go into any detail about the legal fallout. But I suspect that far more people (besides the very few convicted) would have known about the fraud. There must have been people who knew ticket prices and knew sales numbers and could multiply, and who would have known that sales were never going to cover costs, by a margin in the tens of millions.
I suspect people around McFarlane - possibly including some of the people interviewed - were not squeaky clean and may well have done a deal with the FBI to give evidence against McFarlane in return for immunity.
What all this leads to is that anyone involved with Fyre II better have their criminal attorney on speed dial. Saying “Golly gee, McFarlane held the purse strings and I had no idea that it was all a big fraud” might have worked the first time around but it won’t work the second.
They should have to wear a scarlet letter F.
An important bit of context is that Fuck Jerry, one of the promoters behind the festival, were also producers of the Netflix doc so they had some inherent interest in making themselves not look like total muppets.
The rival Hulu doc lays into the Netflix doc and there was some fun bit of “the girls are fighting” from the two docs being released almost simultaneously.
Shocking developments in the last month around Fyre 2.
After the permitting fiasco with Isla Mujeres, the festival was moved to Playa del Carmen in Mexico. However, the local government said the festival didn’t have the permits there either. So the Fyre organizers posted screenshots of all their communications showing they did in fact have permits.
Except the permits are for a 12-hour listening party, 250 people maximum, recorded music only. Oops.
Meanwhile, tickets are no longer being sold on the Fyre website.
This last is probably the only good news in this whole sordid tale.
Darn, I wanted to watch another shitshow evolve, so I could laugh at the grifters … and especially the griftees.
Speaking of which, does anyone know how many (if any) tickets were sold for Fyre 2: Electric Bamboozaloo?
I too would like to know if anyone was stupid enough to buy tickets to this fiasco…and whether they are allowed out in public without adult supervision.
Just wait until they start suing and news media get a hold of the story - how hard everyone is going to laugh at these people.
I think George W. Bush said it best:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can’t get fooled again.”
Did you know the word ‘gullible’ is not found in the Oxford Dictionary? I assume a lot of the suckers who went to Fyre knew that.
If that’s a legit quote … I gotta say, that dude had quite the way with words. Better even than the stuff attributed to Yogi Berra.
As @Mangetout already quoted upthread.
Someone elsewhere said they knew some journalists and influencers who had bought tickets to Fyre 2 - not because they expected it to be a success but because they wanted to be able to document the leadup, and if the festival took place in any form, they wanted to be there to film the trainwreck.
It’s a classic.
There also isn’t a wikipedia entry for GulIible: