Andy King, a former investor of the infamous Fyre Festival, has shared concerns over “red flags” for a reboot event currently scheduled for April 2025.
The original Fyre Festival was scheduled across two weekends in April and May back in 2017, with artists such as Disclosure, Major Lazer, Kaytranada, and more listed on the bill. Festival-goers arrived to find all the talent cancelled, and promises of glamorous accommodation and catering were non-existent. The festival became the subject of the 2019 Netflix documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
The festival’s organiser, Billy McFarland was sentenced in 2018 to six years in jail for wire fraud as a result of the failed festival, and was also ordered to return $29m to investors. He was freed in 2022 as part of an early release programme but remains on probation until August 2025.
Speaking to the BBC, King says McFarland is “known for the biggest failure in pop culture and wants to flip the script. But I’m not sure he’s going about it the right way.” In the Fyre Netflix documentary, King became the centre of arguably its most talked about viral moment, in which he claimed McFarland urged him to offer sexual favours to Bahamian customs officials to secure enough bottled water for the 2017 event.
He adds, “I’m just seeing a lot of red flags, and a lot of red lights, and I feel bad. It saddens me… We were going to rent one of the biggest estates in the Hamptons and have a big, swanky party. We ended up having 30 people at a pizza place along the Montauk highway.”
McFarland, however, confirmed on NBC News earlier this month that work on a reboot dubbed Fyre II is underway, with the festival set to go ahead from 25-28 April next year, on a private island off the coast of Mexico.
He claims 100 early bird tickets at a price of $449 have already been sold. Other tickets start at $1,400 but go as high as $1.1m for a “luxury package” supposedly including yachts, scuba diving, and island hopping. He is yet to book talent. McFarland claims “Fyre II has to work”, and that he has spent a year planning it.
