The New York bankruptcy court has ruled in favour of a number of attendees at the conclusion of a lawsuit against the festival organisers. Fyre Festival saw 5,000 attendees in total who paid anywhere from $1,000 to $12,000 for a ticket to the heavily promoted music event, which had advertised popular acts such as Major Lazer and Blink-182. Upon their arrival, the festival goers were met with a limited number of tents as their only accommodation, meagre food and water and none of the scheduled performers.
Fyre Festival’s creator Billy MacFarland was jailed in 2018 for fraudulent earnings of $27.4 million across several corrupt ventures. These included the club card company Magnises and the ticket-selling operation NYC VIP Access, which touted fake tickets to major events such as Coachella and the Met Gala. Despite pleading guilty and remaining in prison, he is still estimated to be worth $5 million.
Fyre Festival has since become a cultural phenomenon of the 21st century. Netflix’s documentary film Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened garnered 20 million viewers in its first month of release in 2019. The rapper and festival co-organiser Ja Rule has recently put the rights to a famous tweet of a cheese sandwich provided at the festival up for auction, a post which has been cemented in internet meme history.
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