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U.S.|Scandal-Ridden Fyre Festival Is Sold for $245,000 on eBay
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/us/fyre-fesival-sold-ebay.html
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Billy McFarland, who served nearly four years in prison for fraud, said in April that he would put the beleaguered brand that he founded up for sale.
July 16, 2025, 6:18 p.m. ET
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.
