The company promises to deliver a virtual reality-powered experience where users can beam themselves onto a tropical island from the comfort of their homes and control what happens there, McFarland claims.
A link from the bare-bones PYRT site to the business communication platform Calendly shows McFarland’s hourly consulting fee of $1,800, designed to help tech companies expand their reach on social media platforms.
McFarland posted a TikTok video explaining the company’s vision, but social media users weren’t convinced — ridiculing him for wearing socks, sweat pants, and a T-shirt while holding a water bottle.
One wrote sarcastically: “Absolutely no way this could go wrong, Billy.” Another TikTok user who apparently anticipates the venture turning into another scandal wrote: “Can’t wait for the Netflix show.”
“Come on, this just can’t be for real,” another TikTok user commented, noting that McFarland was “being straight out of prison and on to the next hustle.”
The idea is for users sitting at home on their couches to digitally attend exclusive parties with celebrities and influencers in an “immersive” environment that makes them think they’re on a remote, tropical island.
“They could, like, buy the talent a drink and then have some drink service bringing [the same kind of drink] to them at the same time the talent gets it,” McFarland told The Post last week.The event has since become the subject of two documentaries chronicling the chaos and its creator’s downfall, but the debacle had been founded on an unrelenting online hype machine in the weeks leading up to the festival. The event’s marketing campaign was built on the promotions of supermodels and influencers and luxurious branding geared toward a wealthy audience.
The campaign proved to be a success, as the previously unheard-of festival managed to sell out 95% of its tickets in the first 48 hours of sale.
Infamous Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland thinks an hour of his valuable time is worth nearly $2,000.
The convicted con man, who had nothing but time on his hands while spending four years in prison for bilking investors out of $26 million, recently launched a new scheme that offers advice to tech entrepreneurs for a mere $1,800.
The consulting fee is one of the services provided by PYRT (pronounced “pirate”), McFarland’s new venture that smacks of his notorious music festival fiasco in the Bahamas.
Billy McFarland, the fraudster and entrepreneur who cofounded the disastrous Fyre Festival in 2017, is now a free man after four years of prison and six months of house arrest ended last September. McFarland was convicted of several fraudulent schemes and making false statements to authorities.
But prison was far from time poorly spent, according to McFarland, who claims he used his time behind bars, including 10 months of solitary confinement as punishment after he participated in a podcast using a prison phone, cooking up his next business project: leveraging his marketing résumé for startup clients. And this time, he’s promising it isn’t a scam.
McFarland’s tweet was referring to the marketing campaign behind the Fyre Festival, which drummed up massive interest in an event that turned into the polar opposite of expectations.
In 2017, he charged would-be festivalgoers up to $12,000 a ticket to attend his music festival on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma, where the promised luxury villas, A-list musical acts, and fine dining were replaced by no performances, unpaid employees, and disaster relief tents.
In his Twitter post, McFarland invited startup founders and entrepreneurs to learn from his highly successful strategy. “Want to learn my method?” he asked, before boiling down his marketing philosophy to an ability to give people what they want more than anything: “To get access to the things they can’t have.”
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