FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened Documentary
 

Just finished watching this on Netflix. It is fascinating, yet I feel dirty watching how Billy MacFarland ****ed over so many people.

If you enjoy documentaries, watch it now.

"And I went down there fully prepared to suck his dick."

:eek:

LOL I keep trying to figure out if I want to watch this. I guess I will now. I started the Ted Bundy Tapes. I'll grab a look when I finish this.

I've seen both. The Ted Bundy tapes are just fascinating. What a personality. I grew up as a child in the 80s thinking of him as the boogeyman and remember my mother always commenting on how handsome and well-spoken he was. It was great to see the entire progression of the guy's life interwoven with the tapes.

The Fyre documentary is just candy in comparison. Sad though that the guy duped so many people on the island who really suffered as a result.

How the hell did Billy Mcfarlane convince all those investors to put millions of dollars into that festival? He was 24 year old kid. It looked like a good time when they flew the models in for the promotional shoot.

At the beginning I couldn’t help but admire Billy’s skill and ability to sell a dream. By the end I wanted to personally take a bat to his face.

The strangely satisfying part of the story is that he scammed the vain, spoiled, wannabe brats. They got a small taste of the real world for once. The downside is that hard-working people got ****ed in the process.

This. I was truly appalled when they laid into the fraud piece. Jesus ****.

This was an eye opener for me as my social media usage is limited to my personal interests/hobbies, which is very narrow. The whole "influencers" receiving benefits to make social media posts blew me away and I found the question of culpability when a person uses a hashtag to promote something very interesting.

I was amazed that people just threw their money at him.

I can understand employees or whatever, but the big finance firms that did virtually no due diligence is mind boggling.

And precisely zero long-term lessons will be learned...

“We’re not a problems-focused group, we’re a solutions-oriented group, we need to have a positive attitude about this.”

By the festival goers? No. By the people who worked for Fyre's media apparatus and got rat ****ed? Possibly. By the day laborers of an island nation? Probably don't have that luxury.

That said, both this an American Meme make a pretty compelling argument for the systematic liquidation of all social media influencers.

If you like this - American Greed is a great series.

I understand why a spoiled rich kid doesn’t understand how to protect money, but the investors should have had one of their employees attached to ****face’s hip the entire time.

At the very least take a flight down themselves and look at what was going on?

Emotion completely took over everyone’s judgment. That’s a bad mix when it comes to money.

By the financiers and people that traffic in 'influencers'...

As for the folks working for Fyre...well I suspect they'll latch onto the next big thing as well. Everyone wants to be or know the next Dan Bilzerian and folks of that ilk. The 'influencer' phenomenon of people who are famous an account of being famous is something that's just not going to go away any time soon.

And when the hangers on bury their heads in the sand, I look to my signature below from Bojack - when you see it all through rose colored glasses, the red flags just don't mean anything to you.

On its own, I wasn't that impressed with it as a documentary. It felt a bit too convenient how many of them were so fooled. I watched it first, and then watched the Hulu one, and I think you have to watch them both for it to be a complete documentary (though both are deeply flawed by questionable ethical choices.) The Netflix doc is heavily influenced by the PR group that promoted Fyre, and consequently it is compromised ethically because they paint their own contributions as ignorance at worst, and innocence at best. The Hulu doc dives in to their culpability. On the other hand, the Hulu producers have an interview with Billy MacFarland that the Netflix group does not. Ethically, this is questionable because they paid him for it. Even with the taint of the payment though, there are a couple of very revealing moments.

What is the Hulu one called?

It is called Fyre Fraud.

Interesting read about the 2 documentaries.

https://qz.com/quartzy/1533746/hulus...d-a-scorecard/

I will say that the hurrah over this is a little outsized.

Yes, many rank/file workers in the Bahamas got ****ed, but did anyone notice the tenor of the workers? Many of them did come across as "hey, lets milk the rich Americans..." It makes for a fairly interesting argument both for and against dependency theory, but it was an interesting takeaway nontheless. And it's not as though these were folks who quit their jobs to come work for MacFarland for a year; these were mostly day laborers who lost out on a few bucks that they wouldn't have had either way had MacFarland not tried to dupe a bunch of idiots. It's a screw job, but it's no sort of tragedy writ large.

And most of those defrauded were a bunch of snobbish, rich assholes who are EXACTLY the kind of people I like seeing separated from their money - folks that largely didn't earn it anyway. A whole lot of "daddy's money" was flushed down the toilet here.

There are a handful of figures who did truly get boned. The woman who ran the restaurant and plowed all her savings into it to get the festival workers fed - that sucks hard. And yes, it always sucks to work for free. But this is more akin to a hysterically convoluted and ultimately failed Kickstarter project than it is a human tragedy.

And at the very least, the victims in this case weren't disproportionately downtrodden to begin with. A lot of fools and their money were parted here.

I wouldn’t mind throwing away 3-6 months of work so some douchbag can hide millions in a scam. /no one ever

It's pretty easy actually. Pay a couple celebs to do some social media posts and the event will sell itself. The event was social status more than anything to sucket stupid rich kids out of their money. The greatest troll.

When you tie yourself, voluntarily, to a bizarre svengali of sorts and you agree to work on credit for him, you expose yourself to those risks.

His "team" drank the kool-aid and allowed themselves to be taken in. And many of them were in some ways complicit - they were down there, they knew the 'luxury private island experience' he was selling was bullshit. And beyond that, many of them WERE getting paid still up until the last couple of weeks when he ran out of investors to tap for emergency capital.

This isn't Robert Courtney watering down cancer drugs here. That's a fraud that devolved into human tragedy. This is a tale as old as time: huckster over-promises and under-delivers. The fact that it looped in a bunch of social media 'influencers' and wealthy young socialites is the only reason it's newsworthy. Take away that kind of flash and the substance is a hell of a lot more benign than the attention its garnered.

Here's the thing - you ALMOST want to give him credit for an absolutely brilliant marketing strategy.

The reason that guy is in prison right now and not on the cover of Wired is that he couldn't hold his wad. I guess the counter is that he could've never found the startup funds for the infrastructure, etc... that he needed to pull it off WITHOUT the buzz. But if he could have just figured out a way to start from a realistic timetable, the marketing blitz behind it was pretty damn impressive.

Just watched it and think hilarious.

Exactly. Give someone an unlimited amount of money that should be used for genuine business purposes but rather is spent entirely on marketing and you can create quite a following, especially in the day and age of the social media influencer.

I have trouble giving him credit for much of anything. Just another example of groupthink and lack of real due diligence.

I don't think it's just that the money was all spent on marketing, it was also wasted because Billy wanted to live his lavish, lazy lifestyle rather than do any of the actual work. A few times in the doc they pointed out that as soon as he got some investor to send more money, they'd go drinking or water skiing.


Reminds me of friends that obsess over starting a business, but that obsession is limited to the fun stuff (coming up with a name, imagining what it will look like) but never lift a finger on a business plan or doing any of the financial work. Those eventually fade into nothing, but this one had enough money behind it to put people's life in danger.

Can't stand dude bros. Could not watch.

Do you enjoy watching dude bros run a dead sprint into a brick wall?

I thought the Hulu one was better done.

very little dude bro.

Now that you put it that way...

But the marketing blitz was really the brainchild of **** Jerry, who ALSO, had the brilliance to create their own documentary expose (the Netflix one) which basically downplays their role in the whole thing.

If you watch the Hulu one, which wasn't produced by **** Jerry, it shows that they were extremely involved in creating the whole false image that got sold to the public (of course.. that's their job).

If you haven't checked out the ridiculous tale of Threatin (the fake metal "star" who created an entire history and fanbase from cyber thin air then toured Europe on that), you definitely need to.

Definitely a documentary in the making.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...e-fanbase-tour

What fascinated me the most about the whole scam was how he started hitting up people on the Fyre mailing list after the event bombed with his NYC VIP scam. While most ignored it some of the same people who were duped into paying for FYRE were duped into this as well. I guess the old saying “A fool and his money will soon be parted” holds true.

Haven't gotten to the Hulu on. I did see that Jerry Marketing or whatever the hell they call themselves were named on some of those suits, so that makes sense.

It’s worth a watch IMO.

They got an interview with McFarland and it is really remarkable how badly he handled the tough questions. He’d answer some of the easy ones with his slick fast talking soft language but would totally clam up when he knew he was pinned. There was one question where he just sat in silence. LOL.

EDIT: it also goes into the fraud/shell game he failed so miserably at.

It’s worth a look.

I watched both the Netflix and Hulu ones.

What got to me wasn’t necessarily the effect of it but how far it actually got before the wheels came off.

I barely even remembered it happening. I am so far removed from the social media culture that it totally flew right by my radar. The fact that it was such an epic ****ing disaster was entertaining for me because I was unfamiliar with the story.

The appalling thing to me was nobody anywhere was like “Nah. I’m out.” From what they were promising to what was coming together, I’d have set out to distance myself that ****fest far sooner than virtually anybody else in either production. Even beyond the employees if I was a vendor or contractor when shit started going sideways I’d have gotten my money upfront.

I’m admittedly pretty naive regarding shenanigans ****heads pull but this was obviously a ****fest far sooner than the day of and its remarkable that he kept the group together as long as he did.

That’s what was interesting to me.

So I watched American Meme because of this post. Holy shit. I had no idea any of that shit is happening.

My ****ing god. People are ****ing weird.

This is why I don't feel terribly bad for any of the contractors involved in the festival. Those people were complicit. That Yoga guy spends that whole documentary trying to cover himself in glory but in the end - the dude never said "y'know what, screw this..."

Now on the flipside, there's some very very real risk involved there. What if by some unbelievable miracle MacFarland had been able to come across one last investor who chucked $5 million into the thing and allowed a hail mary contractor play and somehow pulled the thing to a disappointing show, but not actionable misconduct?

No our 'principled' Yoga teacher, who said '**** this, I'm out', is probably gonna be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for breach of contract.

I mean if you're gonna walk away from something like that, you'd better by God believe you're right. Your best bet in that case would just be loud enough and pissy enough to get yourself canned.

I did feel bad for the Fyre employees who worked on the app development teams, though. I mean what the hell? For those guys, Fyre was the app. That was the whole company. And the party was just a marketing push. They had know way to realize that this failed marketing push would end up blowing apart the whole company. They got proper rogered.

And credit to anybody on any conference call with JaRule for not telling that bumble**** to sit down and shut up. The amount of self-restraint that must have taken is truly extraordinary.

I have no idea what Yoga teachers contract said, but yeah, if he had some contingents that were breachable, but given how ****edy ****ed the **** up it was, I'd think I could find a breach on the other end. At least at the point at which they were like, "lets roll with FEMA tents." I damn sure wouldn't want to be party to defrauding customers who bought villas.

But I got the idea that he was just a standard employee. I was pushing through some return to operations calculations, so I could have easily missed something.

Yeah, the app folks got fisted. The only people in the whole damn thing that were actually doing legitimate work. And what a smarmy douche he was to be like, "yeah, there isn't going to be any payroll. So....".

You're right, the JaRule shit was hilariously... **** I don't even know... I'm not sure the English language has the proper adverb/adjective arsenal to describe it.

In that 'debriefing' afterwards where he's just shouting coachspeak interspersed with random swearing and the emperor has clearly been exposed as not wearing any clothes, I have no idea how nobody in that room stood up and said "Hey, maybe we don't need a rapper trying to F-Bomb his way into a corporate re-branding. Maybe instead the adults in the room should figure out how we're all gonna avoid prison time..."

I’m going to guess it is because McFarland led with the payroll bit.

I know I would have tuned everything out except the FBI shit.

The level of ineptitude was really staggering. Although at this point it shouldn’t be. When I was growing up all I really knew was 1. Sports and 2. Farming. Both of which there is no way to hide performance.

Then I went to college and got exposed to hucksters and bullshitters and the like and really developed a decent eye for bullshit. And the longer I went the more astounded I was by the number of people getting through life without really ever being held accountable for performance. And this I suppose is just an extension of that astonishment journey I’ve been on since I was 19. Even though this idiot did it through straight up, not even creative fraud.

Fun story,

These guy reached out to my firm to come setup networking for the whole even......

They reached out 6 months prior, to which I excitedly said "**** no".

The government charged 80,000 just to get a basic Coax out to the site, and this was going to have to be a crazy amount of networking equipment. But they wanted us to carry the cost and they would pay later. We are talking about 200k worth of Cisco/Aerohives etc....

Yeah dodged a bullet there.

Yikes. That’s a little close to home.

They reengaged us 45 days before it was supposed to get going. I said No again after two meetings.

They had nothing:
-No WAPS
-No IPS Vendor
-No Contracts

Once I got done with them on the phone I told them good luck. I knew this thing was a cluster **** waiting to happen.

LOL. Good on you for not saying HERP DERP BILLAY GOT DIS YO

I watched the Hulu doc on this during a flight. It was very good, and showed a different perspective of the whole thing.

Watch both. It’s worth it.

Yeah. They got farther into the mechanics of the fraud and essentially this cat was a ****ing joke but he sweet talked that blonde trophy wife who wanted to bank roll big dogs like her hubby.

It is amazing once you are out in the real world how many professionals either don't give a damn or are incompetent.

The story from one of the workers was that he got off the phone after securing more funding hi-fives him and says “let’s go ride jet ski’s”.

Where is Ja? Help me Jarule!

This ****. ROFL

Billy McFarland says it’s on.

https://gizmodo.com/billy-mcfarland-...ner-1850318426

Conventions and other events like that are ALWAYS a bitch. The customer doesn't want to commit to the install because they don't intend on keeping it. Last mile providers are slow as shit to actually put anything in. It's just a shit storm of non-cooperation. We simply don't do them anymore - not worth it at all.

Looks like he needs to find another venue.

See Elizabeth Holmes

See Sam Bankman Fried

See Charlie Javice

Wait the guy’s name is Aviation?