ME: What about a Coachella where you could die?
JA RULE: Go on.— Volcel Proust (@Ugarles) April 28, 2017
Seems like nobody can resist the chance to mock a bunch of mostly-young Rich Snowflakes suffering — for once — some penalties for being over-privileged and under-smart…
… Fyre Festival was supposed to be an elite and luxurious musical festival. Hosted on a private island in the Bahamas — which was once owned by Pablo Escobar — tickets ranged into the thousands, and the promo videos for the event, which was co-organized by Ja Rule, featured Bella Hadid and other professionally hot people frolicking on sandy beaches and diving into pristine waters. Except, when the people who actually ponied up those dollars showed up to the event this week, Fyre did not deliver. The site was unfinished, headliner Blink-182 had canceled, and the luxurious villas festivalgoers were promised turned out to be nothing more than disaster-relief shelters…
So happy our plane never took off. We were about 5 minutes from joining "Lord of the Fyre Flies: Ja Rule's Revenge." #FyreFestival
— Jeremy Burke (@JEREMYBURKE) April 28, 2017
NYMag also had the single best summary of why things went so wrong…
In early March, a friend of mine texted me to ask if I wanted to be a talent producer for the Fyre Festival. I’d never heard of it, but the gig involved going to the Bahamas and being paid extremely well. So I said yes and packed my bags. The festival was supposed to be a luxury music retreat where elite millennials could mingle with “influencers” and models. Tickets cost between $1K and $125K, gourmet food and accommodations were promised. I was planning to spend the next two months working on the festival, but a mere four days after I arrived I was back on a plane to New York…
On March 14, I flew from Miami to the island of Great Exuma to get the planning started. I was excited, at least at first. Flying in, the water looked beautiful — but I was almost immediately warned not to go near it because of a rampant shark problem. That was an omen I regrettably missed…
My job as a talent producer was to coordinate travel and on-site logistics with the artists who would be performing: Blink 182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, among others, had already signed on. I would be working with an 11-person team and a few of the festival executives. The production team was all new hires and, before we arrived, we were led to believe things had been in motion for a while. But nothing had been done. Festival vendors weren’t in place, no stage had been rented, transportation had not been arranged. Frankly, we were standing on an empty gravel pit and no one had any idea how we were going to build a festival village from scratch.
Pending disaster aside, I started working from an island rental house. I contacted the booked artists’ tour managers to start to coordinate. Almost all of them had the same question for me, which was along the lines of, “Hey … Where’s our money??” I tried to email the business manager to get an answer, who said something like “stand by” for three days in a row. By the end of the week it became clear they would not pay the people they owed…
He dropped out of Bucknell to to create an elite millennial-targeted credit card that didn't give you any of the rewards promised, so.
— Tyler Dinucci (@nuccbko) April 28, 2017
Didn’t take the media long to track down the bro responsible. Per the Washington Post:
… Long before he was forced to apologize for his now notorious Fyre Festival, entrepreneur Billy McFarland founded another company in 2013 called Magnises that made some familiar-sounding promises targeting status-seeking millennials.
For an annual membership fee of about $250, Magnises members could “unlock their cities and take their lives to the next level.” They were assured exclusive tickets to “private members-only concerts, tastings with notable chefs, and exclusive art previews at top galleries,” as well as access to hard-to-book Broadway shows (including “Hamilton”) and events such as New York Fashion Week.
But some of those benefits never materialized or were far from what was advertised, according to a report earlier this year by Business Insider…
… McFarland… despite describing Friday as “definitely the toughest day of my life,” was already vowing to forge ahead and hold the event in the future. Perhaps it was his history of moving on from failure. (In 2011, McFarland co-founded a social networking site called Spling, which attracted $400,000 in funding but now appears defunct.) Or his habit of overpromising.
What was clear was that, at least in McFarland’s mind, the Fyre Festival was not dead…
#FyreFestival organizer Billy McFarland explains, in his own words, how things went so horribly wrong https://t.co/m0nSrOKWqF pic.twitter.com/VSGeTGPdGE
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) April 28, 2017
So the Trump Administration has not yet cornered the market in ‘Eminently Punchable Faces’…
Late Night Mockery Open Thread: Faux-Fyre FestivalPost + Comments (79)