EXCL: Ex ‘Fyre Fest’ Alum Andy King Shares Why The Festival Failed—Again

Billy McFarland has announced the sale of the “Fyre” Brand. 

The news comes a couple of weeks after McFarland canceled the much-anticipated sequel to his disastrous Fyre Festival of 2017. Weeks ago, McFarland took to social media to announce that “it’s time to pass the torch.” Just before the cancellation of Fyre 2 and McFarland’s latter announcement, I spoke with a former associate of the disgraced entrepreneur, Andy King. 

King is best known for his appearance in Netflix’s Fyre Fraud (2019) documentary, though he’s mixed on his Evian water bottle-related legacy. 

“I never gave the blowjob,” he says, but “the guy that will do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

For King, it all started when he attended a penthouse party in SoHo hosted by a 20-something McFarland promoting his credit card company, Magnises. Known then as the ‘Concierge of New York City,’ King was a student of the old school of influence– magazine features, galas, introductions.

McFarland, on the other hand, was a disciple of the new doctrine of social media influence. King was impressed with McFarland’s passion for the emerging art of social media campaigns, while McFarland saw King as access to the beau monde of New York, like Wall Street, charity benefits, art galleries—access to big players with bigger wallets. 

“He walked into every hedge fund, every financial firm in New York City and never left without a few million bucks in his pocket,” recalls King. 

King also helped McFarland negotiate a commercial lease for a brownstone to serve as the Magnises’ find, the now-infamous brownstone that served as the headquarters for Magnises and a brief crashpad for iconic Scamstress Anna Delvey. 

“No one was allowed to sleep there,” he says, recalling how someone called him about the fake heiress sleeping on a “gorgeous Italian sofa that turned into a bed that no one was supposed to sleep in.”

According to King, the scene in Shonda Rhimes’ Inventing Ana Netflix series, where Delvey wakes up amid a post-party mess then tells McFarland she’s not interested in investing in his “luxury music festival” is accurate as far as timelines go. 

Which brings us back to Fyre Fest. 

Fyre 1 (Andy’s Version)

While McFarland, Ja Rule, and associates spent the early months of 2017 scrambling over an undeveloped plot of land in Great Exuma, King was shoveling snow outside Tahoe for an event aimed at attracting potential buyers for Magnises.

It was about six weeks before thousands of millennials were about to descend onto the barren site with no stage and no amenities that McFarland finally called King. 

“He sent a private jet to pick me up,” he says, “I’m like ‘wow, that’s 50 grand or 60 grand.’”

“I land in The Bahamas. There’s the team working away— all young kids. I’m the only one with grey hair in the room,” King recalls. 

“I’m not gonna say they looked at me like I was Jesus but here’s potentially a savior,” that could potentially convince McFarland to postpone the festival, or at last try to lower expectations. When McFarland told him he was $25 million in the hole, King said “Jeepers, Billy,” and opted for the latter. 

“I tried to save it,” says King, by trying to get McFarland to reverse the ‘luxury’ aspect of the marketing and reducing the experience to a more “boutique-y” beach getaway. 

“The lineup [was] amazing and we [had] enough tequila to sink the Titanic… on one of the most beautiful islands [in the world],” he explains. 

According to King, it was McFarland’s partner Grant Margolin who indulged his delusions about flying in Michelin-star chefs— “I’m not sure what you’re smoking, but it’s not going to work.”

One unappetizing picture of a cheese sandwich later and Fyre Fest and the name Billy McFarland became shorthand for fraudulent. McFarland was sentenced to six years and ordered to pay millions in restitution. 

Fyre 2

Fast forward to 2022. McFarland is released after serving four years of his six-year sentence, Despite telling the New York Times in 2022 that he wanted to pivot to tech, the newly freed entrepreneur wasted no time trying to get back into the musical festival business.

Unsurprisingly, few of McFarland’s former Fyre partners were interested in working with him. His new partner, Mike Falb. Like Margolin before him, King says Falb is “another Billy” who simply tells him what he wants to hear. 

Their new venture was to be named PYRT and they announced Fyre 2 last February. The description of the event— “a three-day escape to the Mexican Caribbean where you’ll explore by day alongside your favourite talent and come together at night to celebrate with music” —is nearly identical to the one promised in 2017. 

Though the announcement wasn’t entire shocking, it was baffling. How can someone who owes tens of millions in restitution and back taxes secure funding for this kind of venture. 

It became all but inevitable that Fyre 2 would either go the way of its predecessor or be cancelled, when the tourist board of the Isla Mujeres—the alleged host city of Fyre 2— issued a statement claiming: “We have no knowledge of this event, nor contact with any person or company about it. For us, this is an event that does not exist.”

McFarland found another site, but as the date neared, he may have finally listened to the advice from the people around him and canceled the event. 

When Magnises went bankrupt, King received nothing from his stock options. And, because he never signed a contract, he never received compensation for his work on Fyre. However, King says he’s never received a full-hearted apology from McFarland. 

“I mean maybe he touched on it a tiny bit, but it wasn’t like ‘Andy, I am so sorry for what I put you through,’” he reveals. “Forget the spoiled kids that had a bad weekend at $1,200 that didn’t work out. Think about these people that spent months and months working and basically had careers destroyed.”

“Nobody who’s worked with him in the past will work with him again,” says King, “Nobody.”

King initially wanted to believe that McFarland was, deep down, a decent person, which confounded Whoopi Goldberg on a special episode of ABC’s The Con. 

While he could offer no insight into what ‘PYRT’ means, he is aware that McFarland has been living as if the first Fyre never happened. He’s allegedly only paid about $50 grand of the $25 million owed to investors, but still lives in an expensive Manhattan apartment taking his girlfriend Anastasia on lavish dates. 

King is currently working on a memoir about his career and how he ended up on a Netflix documentary talking about trading sexual favors for bottles of water. When asked if he thought McFarland would ever write a memoir or sell his life rights for a fictionalization like Anna Delvey did, King was doubtful that people would want to buy “The World of Billy McFarland.”

King said, “I mean, what is reality and what is not? It’s sad. I thought the world of Billy and he, you know, decided to ghost me after [Fyre Fest].”

Though he admits he’s lost jobs because of the toxicity from Fyre, he’s also somewhat grateful to be connected to something with such an immense cultural impact.

Last year, when a $35-per-ticket Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-themed adventure turned out to be cheap props in an abandoned warehouse, Entertainment Weekly called it “Chocolate Fyre Fest,” while The Cut wrote, “Welcome to Fyre Fest: Wonka Edition.”

“It’s amazing when you think Fyre is a Harvard case study: a 20-something-year-old kid [with no experience] raise over thirty million bucks,” says King. “And now, he’s out, at it again.”