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Meet Fyre Festival’s new owners
Johnny Nunez/WireImage via Getty Images
- Fyre Festival founder and CEO Billy McFarland sold the event’s branding rights in an eBay auction.
- LimeWire, a file-sharing service that was once a hotbed for illegal downloads, won that auction.
- LimeWire outbid Ryan Reynolds’ ad agency, Maximum Effort, for the rights and paid $245,300.
When Billy McFarland, the founder and CEO of the failed Fyre Festival, said he had auctioned the branding rights to the event on eBay in July, he did not mention who had bought it.
Two months later, the mysterious buyer of the infamous event has finally come forward to claim their purchase.
The file-sharing service company LimeWire said in a statement on Tuesday that it had officially acquired the Fyre Festival brand “after a competitive bidding process” that included Ryan Reynolds’ viral ad agency, Maximum Effort.
“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” Julian Zehetmayr, the co-CEO of LimeWire, said on Tuesday.
“We’re not bringing the festival back — we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches,” he added.
LimeWire and McFarland did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
The Fyre Festival gained notoriety after festival attendees were greeted with a sight resembling a disaster drill when they arrived in the Bahamas in April 2017.
Instead of villas and gourmet meals, guests were housed in FEMA disaster relief tents and served unappetizing cheese sandwiches. Bahamian locals who worked as caterers and laborers for the event said they were not paid their salaries.
McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud related to the festival in 2018. He was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay $26 million to investors, festival attendees, and vendors.
In March 2022, McFarland was released from prison early. He initially touted a sequel to the Fyre Festival in 2023 but eventually decided to sell the event’s branding rights in April.
The auction on eBay drew 175 bids and was ultimately sold for $245,300.
“Damn. This sucks. It’s so low,” he said of the final sale price during a July livestream.
It is unclear what plans LimeWire has for the Fyre Festival. The file-sharing service was founded by Wall Street trader Mark Gorton in 2000 and became a hotbed for illegal downloads.
LimeWire was shut down in 2010 after a court ruled that it had committed copyright infringement.
Zehetmayr and his brother, Paul, first relaunched LimeWire as an NFT marketplace in 2022 before turning it into a file-sharing service again.
LimeWire said in its statement on Tuesday that it would “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre” in the next few months. The company added that it would expand the brand “beyond the digital realm” and into the real world.
As of press time, visitors to the Fyre Festival website can sign up for an email waitlist to receive updates. Fyre Festival-branded merchandise, such as T-shirts, hoodies, caps, and bags, is also being sold on the website’s store.
“We’re not here to repeat the mistakes — we’re here to own the meme and do it right,” LimeWire’s chief operating officer, Marcus Feistl, said on Tuesday.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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