- Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival chapter has come to a close. The disgraced owner of the brand behind the disaster luxury music festival sold its intellectual property for $245,300 on eBay. The sum falls far short of some of the ticket options McFarland previously promised for a planned Fyre Festival event, including a $1.1 million package. The final bid falls further still than the $26 million in restitution following McFarland’s wire-fraud conviction.
Fyre Festival, the troubled luxury music event and brainchild of disgraced founder Billy McFarland, sold on eBay for $245,300 on Tuesday, with 42 bidders putting 175 bids on the brand.
But the chunk of change McFarland will walk away with pales in comparison with the ticket prices of some Fyre Festival packages—and the legal bill he is saddled with following wire-fraud convictions associated with the event.
In 2017, the millennial-wooing Fyre Festival was billed as a luxury music festival with a Bahamian backdrop, star-studded performers like Blink-182 and Migos, and celebrity chef-cooked meals. Instead, the event featured cheese sandwiches served on styrofoam trays and white tents under which rain-soaked guests could shelter. McFarland pleaded guilty to and was convicted of charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, and false statements, serving four years in prison for defrauding the event’s guests.
A year after his 2022 release, McFarland resurrected the festival, promising a revamped luxury experience on Isla Mujeres in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Tickets for the event scheduled for May 2025 spanned from $1,400 to seven digits, with a $1.1 million Prometheus package getting guests a private jet from Miami to Cancún, a four-bedroom villa, and a list of unspecified “Fyre experiences,” among other perks. The event was effectively cancelled in April after McFarland announced the sale of the brand.
Beyond McFarland’s winnings amounting to only a quarter of the cost of this expensive ticket deal, the Fyre Festival sale will also do little to dent the $26 million the court ordered him to pay to his victims.
McFarland told Bloomberg he expected Fyre Festival’s intellectual property—including trademarks and social-media accounts—to sell for at least $1 million by going viral and said he plans to put some of the money toward paying off his legal bill.
“FYRE Festival is just one chapter of my story, and I’m excited to move onto my next one,” McFarland wrote on social media. “The auction became the most-watched non-charity listing on eBay during its run, proving once again that attention is currency, and views are the root of attention.”
McFarland did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
What will it take for Fyre Festival to reignite under new ownership?
With so much scorched earth behind it, Fyre Festival will be an ambitious revival project, according to Andrew Mall, an associate professor of music at Northeastern University. Its failed second iteration only confirmed people’s beliefs in the brand’s failure following the 2017 scandal, he said.
“Billy McFarland doesn’t know how to build a team that puts on events,” Mall told Fortune. “He only knows how to build a team that generates publicity and draws eyeballs.”
McFarland put Fyre Festival’s viral status at the forefront of his sale’s pitch: On the eBay listing, he wrote “Every success and every misstep only made the name more powerful.” Mall said the new owner of the brand could lean into, and reclaim, the event’s previous disasters, imagining a “Survivor”-style event with ticket holders having to brave obstacles in order to later kick their feet up and enjoy luxury offerings.
“You buy into this knowing you’re going to go somewhere gorgeous, but then you’re going to be roughing it,” Mall said. “Maybe at the end of roughing it, there are also some beautiful events, but you have to outlast and outwit your fellow attendees in order to enjoy the experience at the end.”
But with the buyer unknown, there’s a chance Fyre Festival’s new owner isn’t interested in luxury events, but instead plans to license the brand to generate revenue from media projects like documentaries. The deal also contained carve-outs, including that McFarland would retain the right to use Fyre for music and television streaming platforms.
The Fyre Festival brand may have several different futures, but with McFarland saddled with a steep legal bill and an auction outcome falling far short of expectations, Mall was left with one question about the sale: “How does it benefit McFarland?”
