Scandal-ridden Fyre Festival is sold for $315k on eBay
According to the eBay listing, 175 bids had been placed in about a week on the auction site.
It had billed itself as an unrivaled music festival experience, one that its organisers 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 July 15 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 US$245,300 (S315,000) 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 pay any amount to inherit a brand with such a dubious reputation?
According to 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.
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The listing was not eligible for eBay's purchase protection programmes, 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,' he said in a July 7 social media video while walking along the Hudson River in New York. 'Ugh.'
As the bidding closed on July 15, 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'.
The sale appeared to bring an unceremonious end to Mr McFarland's festival gambit, which relied on influencers including models Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner to promote its inaugural event in 2017.
Weekend ticket packages ranged from US$1,200 to more than US$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. NYTIMES
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