Billy McFarland: Entrepreneur and convicted fraudster behind the infamous 2017 Fyre Festival and the Magnises card; served roughly four years and ten months in prison for wire fraud, now building a new venture called Pyrt.
What this episode covers
Steven Bartlett interviews Billy McFarland about his life from a tech-obsessed New Jersey childhood through a string of startups (Spling, Magnises, the Fyre app) that culminated in the disastrous Fyre Festival. McFarland details how a compulsive need to prove himself drove him to lie to investors, sponsors, and ticket buyers, raising over $20 million for a festival he had four months to build. He describes the festival's collapse, his arrest, continued fraud while on bail selling fake event tickets, a six-year prison sentence, and ten months in solitary confinement. He reflects on remorse, restitution, the trauma he witnessed in jail, and his hopes for redemption through his new live-streaming experiences company, Pyrt.
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Cameo
Cameo
“right now it's doing everything and anything like have a TV deal I've been signing baseball cards I'm on Cameo”— Billy McFarland
Hamilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda
“so you would Hamilton the Super Bowl you would email people Coco and tell them you had tickets take the money”— Steven Bartlett
AlphaSmart
AlphaSmart
“I remember back to like getting an alpha Smart in early grammar school and I was so desperate to hack the teachers admin password”— Billy McFarland
The Wall Street Journal
Dow Jones
“I was in solitary for it was my first stint there and had a Wall Street Journal newspaper come in and it was around the holiday times”— Billy McFarland
Big reveals from this episode
- McFarland says a childhood friend, not himself, originally suggested doing a music festival on the Bahamian islands.
- He admits he started lying in the weeks before the December 2016 promo video, lying to Fyre app investors, festival investors, and about Magnises's numbers.
- He describes an 'urgent payment sheet' where he'd wake up needing up to $4 million by 2pm, surviving like this for almost 60 days.
- He denies literally ordering Andy King to perform oral sex, saying the 'suck this guy's dick' comment was in jest, meaning go above and beyond to get the water released.
- An investor threatened him that he'd be in handcuffs on the front page of the Wall Street Journal unless he paid back a seven-figure sum.
- While on bail he kept committing fraud, selling fake tickets to events like Hamilton, the Met Gala, Burning Man, and Coachella, which got his bail revoked.
- He spent 10 months total in solitary; a seven-month stint was retaliation for recording a podcast over the jail payphone, nearly being sent to a terrorist facility.
- The Bahamas government declared him a fugitive and banned him from returning until vendors are paid back.
Worth remembering
- McFarland got a cable internet line at age 10 and treated the early web as a 'Wild West' outlet to push boundaries.
- At 12 he built a private MySpace-style social network for his middle school that blew up before teachers shut it down.
- He started programming at nine and sold his first company on an auction site as a teenager.
- Magnises began with him buying a blank black metal card and credit card copier on Alibaba to mimic an Amex Black card.
- He raised more than $20 million for the festival at age 25, much of it from people who had backed him since he was 19.
- On the eve of the festival the exhausted team had collapsed asleep when a storm rolled in 'as if On Cue.'
- On festival day there were nearly 800 mostly local contract workers and McFarland couldn't find any of his core team.
- He canceled the festival after being wrongly told three people had died, based on false rumors spreading on Twitter.
- His sentence includes lifetime restitution (wage garnishment) and a lifetime SEC bar from being an officer of a public company.
- He recounts overhearing a young inmate being raped in Brooklyn Detention Center, who was later slashed with a razor after the assault became known.