Imagine being one of the most notorious fraudsters in years and then casually returning to the scene of the crime to host a treasure hunt. That’s just the life that Fyre Festival co-founder Billy McFarland leads somehow.
The disgraced businessman announced his new venture this week as part of a documentary film called After the Fyre, as per Deadline.
McFarland will return to the Bahamas for a massive treasure hunt called PYRT, and will begin by having participants track down one of 99 bottles with a message contained inside.
“This time, everybody’s invited,” he recently said in a teasing TikTok clip (watch below), a queasy nod to the supposed exclusivity of the luxury Fyre Festival. Hey, if you’ve already squeezed money from the wealthy, why not now come for the masses?
McFarland is able to put on treasure hunts on beautiful Caribbean islands after he was released early from a six-year prison sentence for wire and bank fraud. He served less than a year of his sentence, but has been ordered to pay $26 million in restitution to various investors, vendors and ticketholders involved in the ill-fated Fyre Festival.
While appearing on Good Morning America last week, the businessman did apologise for the infamous event. “I was wrong,” he admitted, adding that he ended up down a “terrible path of bad decisions” as he had a “desparate desire to prove people right.”
It’s unclear who agreed to back McFarland’s latest venture, after such a high-profile business disaster, but it’ll be, um, interesting to see how his treasure hunt pans out. As he once said himself, though, “failure is ok in entrepreneurship.”
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McFarland c0-founded Fyre Festival alongside Ja Rule in 2016, promising a “luxury” festival experience. Originally scheduled to take place in April/May 2017, the festival failed after attendees found problems with the food, logistics, accommodations, security, and talent bookings.
