Fyre Fest Sells for $245,300 on eBay
“Billy McFarland Entrepreneur 2014” by Ian Moran (I to Z Photo + Video) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Yesterday, the shameless and painfully drawn-out saga of Fyre Fest’s return met its end, not with the second long-looming destination event, but with a digital whimper. Bidding in Billy McFarland’s Hail Mary eBay auction for the entirety of the festival’s brand and dubious assets closed just before 1 p.m., with a final offer of $245,300 beating out a field of 174 others.
The unknown buyer now holds the rights to all of Fyre’s trademarks, IP, social media channels, email and SMS lists, as well as the option for the Caribbean event location he confirmed in June after accusing government officials of theft at his previous location of Playa del Carmen. “Whoever owns the Fyre brand will have an attention engine to launch festivals, do merch collabs, do insane pop-ups, run livestreams, or build a media brand,” McFarland said while announcing “the craziest thing I’ve ever done” in his final hectic “walk and talk.”
It seems the first thing to go was the letterhead. McFarland confirmed the sale with a message written in his Notes app and posted to his personal Instagram account. “The auction became the most-watched non-charity listing on eBay while it was live,” he wrote, “proving once again that attention is currency, and views are the root of attention.” Of course, attention is not currency currency, as the closing bid came in well shy of the purported seven-figure deal to sell that fell through last week, and will hardly put a dent in the $26 million in restitution that the entrepreneur-turned-convicted fraudster still owes. NBC reports that McFarland livestreamed the auction and sighed, “Damn. This sucks. It’s so low.”
The anticlimactic conclusion to Fyre Fest II arrived after the event’s sold-out presale in August 2023, an official announcement in September 2024 in which McFarland forecasted a “chance to embrace this storm and really steer our ship into all the chaos,” and a series of several progressively more disheartening postponements. The organizer insists that this won’t be his last ride, as he’s currently building “a tech platform designed to capture and power the value behind every view online.” His last non-Fyre venture was assisting Donald Trump in connecting with rappers like Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow.
I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!!
— Ja Rule (@jarule) January 20, 2019
