Here’s How Much Debt Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland Owes
Billy McFarland is still chugging along with his plans for Fyre Festival II, the sequel to the 2017 disaster that spawned two documentaries, Fyre Fraud on Hulu and Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. But McFarland has a good reason for this second alleged outing (as details have yet to be released); he’s hoping to pay back the staggering amount of money he owes.
As you’ll recall, hundreds of influencers and celebrities arrived on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma to find not luxury accommodations and chef-prepared meals that they had been promised, but soggy FEMA emergency tents and sad cheese sandwiches in foam containers. And with no running water or internet connection and nearby resorts booked to capacity, it was then a race to get the miserable would-be attendees back to the United States.
McFarland eventually served four years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud for his role in organizing the festival. However, about a year after getting out of prison, he announced that he was planning a second fest.
“Fyre Festival II is finally happening,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet in April 2023. “Tell me why you should be invited.”
In a new interview with the U.S. Sun, the 32-year-old admitted that part of the strategy was to pay back a nearly $7 million IRS tax lien and another whopping $26 million he owes in restitution.
“This is the most tangible way to repay the $26 million that I owe, and having real partners gives an opportunity in the next five to seven years, to actually pay back that $26 million,” McFarland explained. “And unfortunately, no one’s offering me $26 million to work somewhere else.”
In what seems like an admirable way to turn lemons into lemonade, McFarland noted that Fyre was “literally the most talked about music festival in the world.”
“It’s an incredible opportunity to steer that ship into the storm and embrace everything that’s happened,” he continued. “And if Fyre two goes well, the brand recognition of Fyre as a media company, as a travel company, as an entertainment brand is massive, and can make right a lot of the wrongs they did before.”
Though, this time around, McFarland is working with an operating partner company that acquired a 51 percent stake in the festival, which will be in charge of the various talent partners, catering partners, and transportation partners.
“Then there is me and my Fyre team, which is in charge of the marketing and the stunts whether it’s jumping from a helicopter or lobster diving. We are there to make Fyre, Fyre,” he said. “It was really hard to find the right partners to trust me and it took a year after getting out of jail before anyone would answer my phone calls—they would think everything is ridiculous. But now I have a really really solid team and there is someone who’s actually in charge at the festival.”
In the meantime, McFarland is not exactly living the high life he once did, joking that his “personal burn rate,” or the rate in which a person spends in a month, is “as low as it’s been” since he was 15 years old.
“That said, Fyre is about having fun,” he added. “So I still go out and do fun things, whether it’s helicopter jumps or underwater concerts or concerts on runways, I find ways to make it all work, but doing it in a way that’s more sustainable that will allow me to pay everybody back which is the most important thing.
The first batch of tickets for Fyre Festival II went on sale last August for $499 each, with the website stating that the event was being “targeted for the end of 2024 in the Caribbean.” Those tickets reportedly sold out within a day, proving that the adage “a fool and his money are soon parted” is still alive and well.
