It had billed itself as an unrivaled music festival experience, one that its organizers fancied would bring together jet-setters for an Instagram-worthy lineup of A-list acts and hedonism in paradise.
Eat your hearts out, Coachella and Burning Man.
But after ignominiously failing to deliver on lofty promises, ones that resulted in prison time for the event’s founder and documentaries by Netflix and Hulu, the scandal-ridden Fyre Festival sold its branding rights on Tuesday via the auction website eBay.
It did not exactly go out in a blaze of glory — more like a whimper — with an unidentified buyer paying $245,300 to take over the brand and its intellectual property rights from Billy McFarland, 33, a so-called “big-time millennial grifter.”
Still, the sale raised a fundamental question: Why would anyone would pay any amount to inherit a brand with such a dubious reputation?
According the eBay listing, 175 bids had been placed in about a week on the auction site, where a description about the marketing opportunities associated with the Fyre Festival was presented in familiar grandiose terms.
“FYRE isn’t just a name — it’s a global attention engine,” the listing said.
The listing was not eligible for eBay’s purchase protection programs, the auction site advised.
Even before the bidding ended, Mr. McFarland, who served nearly four years in prison for a fraud scheme involving the 2017 festival, could not hide his disappointment that the sale was not going quite as he had hoped.
“We had a seven-figure deal for the complete Fyre brand and IP package that fell through this morning,” Mr. McFarland said in a July 7 social media video while walking along the Hudson River in New York. “Ugh.”
As the bidding closed on Tuesday, Mr. McFarland bemoaned the sale price during a livestream, NBC News reported.
“This sucks,” he said. “It’s so low.”
In a statement, Mr. McFarland congratulated the buyer, whom he did not name, and wrote that the auction proved that “attention is currency.”
On Wednesday, he did not respond to a request for comment. In April, Mr. McFarland announced that he would sell the brand, saying that it was bigger than any one person and that he was stepping back so that a new team could move forward independently.
The sale appeared to bring an unceremonious end to Mr. McFarland’s festival gambit, which relied on model influencers including Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner to promote its inaugural event in 2017.
Weekend ticket packages ranged from $1,200 to more than $100,000 for the festival, which was held on a Bahamian island once owned by Pablo Escobar.
But when guests arrived on the island of Great Exuma, it was not the glamping experience that they had signed up for.
The band Blink-182 had pulled out of the festival, which had failed to materialize. The ticket holders were greeted by dirt fields, soggy mattresses and tents that seemed liked they belonged in a disaster area. The first-class culinary experience promised by organizers? It was replaced by cheese sandwiches in foam boxes that were documented on social media and in a Netflix documentary called “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.”
An avalanche of lawsuits soon followed from the festival’s vendors and investors, at least one of whom said he had lost his life savings. Of greater alarm for Mr. McFarland would be a series of criminal investigations that were opened by the F.B.I., Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors.
In 2018, Mr. McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud related to the festival and to his media company that prosecutors said had cost investors more than $24 million in losses. He was sentenced to six years in federal prison, and he served nearly four years before his release in 2022.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. McFarland was planning to put any of the money from the festival’s sale on eBay toward the $26 million in total restitution that he was ordered to pay those whom he defrauded.
The sale also punctuated an ill-fated attempt by Mr. McFarland to hold a sequel festival at the end of May on Isla Mujeres, a Mexican island and vacation hot spot off the coast of Cancún. But what appeared to be a redemption tour hit an all-too-familiar snag.
After changing the festival’s location to Playa del Carmen in Mexico, organizers announced in April that they would be sending a message to ticket holders announcing that the festival would no longer take place there.
The organizers blamed local authorities for the latest hitch in their plans, accusing the government of robbing Fyre Fest without offering any evidence.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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