The Man Behind Fyre Festival Is Back With a New Scheme

And despite his constant assurances, it sounds an awful lot like history repeating itself.

Billy McFarland, the cofounder of Fyre Festival, is at it again.

The convicted conman, who has been out of prison since September of 2022 and still owes $26 million in restitution for his role in not only scamming, but endangering, around 5,000 people, according to Business Insider, has announced his newest business scheme, which may ring some bells, as it involves a giant party on a remote island, ideally in the Bahamas.

The new project, named PYRT (pronounced like "pirate"), was announced via social media in October, according to NBC News. It seems to be a new marketing organization using a new technology McFarland claims to have been working on for the last couple of years he calls VID/R, or "Virtual Immersive Decentralized Reality."

In a TikTok video breaking down PYRT, he assures viewers it's neither a festival nor event (just, apparently, being kicked off with one), but rather something that can bring people around the world together both virtually and physically and affect real-world change.

How exactly does it do that? Unclear. Its website contains no information, and the video he posted goes on to share that it "all starts with PYRT partnering with a small, remote destination where we will host a handful of artists, content creators, entrepreneurs, and any of you guys who end up joining the PYRT crew."

Tell us again how this isn't just FYRE Festival 2.0?

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In tandem with this event, PYRT will launch "a live, virtual replica of the island, where anybody from around the world can not only watch what's happening live, but they can actually come together with their friends to affect and even own the real world adventures."

Again, there's no information about how exactly one will be able to affect reality from the virtual island, and former associates of McFarland's are already ringing the warning bells.

“Billy’s still Billy. He’s using different words, but he’s selling the same thing,” Shiyuan Deng, a former product designer at the company behind Fyre Festival, told NBC.

Another anonymous former Fyre Media employee told the publication, “The similarities are there around the vague mysterious promotion. PYRT appears to be an exercise in smoke and mirrors, buzzwords and empty promises of lavish trips to the Bahamas."

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They went on to warn, "As a previous employee who trusted Billy’s leadership in the past, new customers, investors and employees should all proceed with caution.”

For his part, McFarland says that overpromising was his downfall for Fyre Festival. ‘You can crawl in a hole and die, or you can go and try to do something and just like not promise any results'" he told NBC.

Unfortunately for McFarland, the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism responded to his announcement, in which he made it clear he intended to host his launch party somewhere in the Caribbean nation, noting that they considered him a "fugitive" and that the government "will not endorse or approve any event in The Bahamas associated with him.”

When speaking with NBC, McFarland conceded that his plans did not currently involve the Bahamas, despite continuing to allude to it in his videos, noting that he hopes his relationship with them can be fixed one day. "I think that once everybody is paid back, I’d love to have a conversation to see if that relationship can get repaired,” he said.

And once all is said and done, he still plans to host a successful festival one day. “I’d love to do that. I feel like I have to at some point in the future. It’s not happening right now,” he said.