Billy McFarland: The Man Behind The Infamous Fyre Festival Disaster | E202

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.

• McFarland says a childhood friend, not himself, originally suggested doing a music festival on the Bahamian islands.
  00:28:28
• 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.
  00:29:09
• 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.
  00:46:37
• 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.
  01:00:09
• 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.
  01:04:18
• 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.
  01:06:22
• 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.
  01:19:48
• The Bahamas government declared him a fugitive and banned him from returning until vendors are paid back.
  01:36:18

• McFarland got a cable internet line at age 10 and treated the early web as a 'Wild West' outlet to push boundaries.
  00:03:06
• At 12 he built a private MySpace-style social network for his middle school that blew up before teachers shut it down.
  00:07:16
• He started programming at nine and sold his first company on an auction site as a teenager.
  00:16:36
• Magnises began with him buying a blank black metal card and credit card copier on Alibaba to mimic an Amex Black card.
  00:22:17
• 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.
  00:41:58
• On the eve of the festival the exhausted team had collapsed asleep when a storm rolled in 'as if On Cue.'
  00:53:25
• On festival day there were nearly 800 mostly local contract workers and McFarland couldn't find any of his core team.
  00:57:36
• He canceled the festival after being wrongly told three people had died, based on false rumors spreading on Twitter.
  00:58:38
• His sentence includes lifetime restitution (wage garnishment) and a lifetime SEC bar from being an officer of a public company.
  01:14:06
• He recounts overhearing a young inmate being raped in Brooklyn Detention Center, who was later slashed with a razor after the assault became known.
  01:23:54

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