Fyre Festival mastermind Billy McFarland is offering an olive branch to the Bahamas, the country where the disaster of a music festival kinda sorta took place in 2017.
April 27, 2017 was one of the best days to be on Twitter as the highly-anticipated and vaguely marketed Fyre Festival — a “luxury” music festival — was set to kick off. The main man behind the festival, Billy McFarland, has since been the subject of several lawsuits and served jail time, and he is ready for his next Bahamian adventure. After a series of cryptic videos teased a treasure hunt organised by McFarland in the Bahamas, the entrepreneur fraudster decided to make things right in a statement addressed to the country.
“I am writing to you to profusely apologise for my actions 5 years ago. I was completely wrong and I wholly regret my actions,” McFarlane said in a statement to the Bahamas, according to reporting from TMZ. While this is all well and good, McFarland allegedly made no direct mention of Fyre Festival itself. Interesting…
“The Government of The Bahamas will not endorse or approve any event in The Bahamas associated with [McFarland],” Bahamas Minister of Tourism, Investments, and Aviation Chester Cooper said in a written statement, also covered by TMZ. “He is considered to be a fugitive…Anyone knowing of his whereabouts should report same to the [Royal Bahamas Police Force].”
Last month, McFarland began teasing his newest venture: Some sort of treasure hunt. The hunt, that is referred to as PYRT (which I can only assume is some play on “pirate”) on McFarland’s TikTok hopes to take place in, you guessed it, the Bahamas. McFarland explains in a later post that he will be hiding 99 bottles across the globe, and each bottle will have its own set of clues and treasure that hunters can find. In an update posted three days ago, McFarland confirmed that he sent the two groups that found the first two bottles to the Bahamas.
It’s not immediately clear if McFarland is gunning for another festival by drumming up excitement via the treasure hunt, or if he’s really just trying to somehow stimulate the local economy and try to right his wrongs by sending people to the islands. Whatever the case may be, it seems like in this situation the Bahamas’ are trying to operate under the proverb, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”