Organizer of Fyre Festival Disaster Admits "We Were a Little Naive"
Billy McFarland, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who organized the disastrous Fyre Festival with Ja Rule, has penned an open letter explaining what went wrong with the project, via Rolling Stone.
ICYMI, festival-goers — who paid thousands of dollars for tickets — landed in the Bahamas to be greeted by disaster relief tents, with barely any food, running water or electricity. Reports were even circulating of feral dogs, gunshots and thieves.
The dinner that @fyrefestival promised us was catered by Steven Starr is literally bread, cheese, and salad with dressing. #fyrefestival pic.twitter.com/I8d0UlSNbd— Tr3vor (@trev4president) April 28, 2017
Most upsetting of all, however, was the supposedly gourmet catering on offer. Sign me up for next year!
"We were a little naive" McFarland explains, in perhaps the biggest understatement in living memory, before hilariously promising "Next year, we will definitely start earlier." Good luck trying to get people to come next year, homie.
Here's some more choice quotes from the piece. Head over to Rolling Stone to read the piece in full.
We thought we were making timeframes that were correct. We were a little naïve in thinking for the first time we could do this ourselves...The reality is, we weren't experienced enough to keep up.
We're going to take every measure to make this right for everybody now, and make this right for everybody next year, on a large scale.
There will be make-up dates, May 2018 in the U.S., free for everybody who signed up for this festival. We will donate $1.50 [per ticket] to the Bahamian Red Cross. It'll keep the theme of being on water and beach. It'll be not just music, but all forms of entertainment. The one change we will make is we will not try to do it ourselves. We will make sure there is infrastructure in place to support us.
Click here to see how Twitter users are roasting Ja Rule for the disaster.