Fyre Festival was an event in 2017 created by entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule to promote McFarland's talent booking app, Fyre Media. Although Fyre Festival was promoted as an exclusive, ultra-luxury music festival featuring top celebrities and artists, attendees arrived to find disaster relief tents instead of villas, minimal food, and several cancelled performances. The disastrous event culminated in multiple lawsuits from ticket holders, a class-action settlement for $2 million in 2021, and federal charges against McFarland for defrauding investors. Event organizer McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit the more than $26M in investor funds he raised using the pitch deck seen here. This 43-slide deck includes many of the exaggerated claims that led to the festival's eventual failure and was first reported on in 2017 by Vanity Fair's Nick Bilton.
2017 • Early Stage
Fyre Festival was a failed musical festival to promote the Fyre Media mobile app; the disastrous event (originally advertised as a luxury experience in the Bahamas) culminated in wire fraud charges against the founder Billy McFarland.
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