Original subtitles

[tense music building]

♪ ♪

[crickets chirping]

CALVIN: You're living in your parents' basement

and you pull out your phone,

which you look at 100 times an hour.

MAN: The actual experience exceeds all expectations.

CALVIN: You see a music festivalc

that exceeds all expectations

on a deserted island owned by Pablo Escobar.

There was music, private planes,

and beautiful women swimming on an island with drugs.

Man, that's about as sexy as it gets.

♪ ♪

And then you see these wonderful, beautiful people

in places that you're not,

doing things that you can't afford to do.

It really didn't matter that these guys may be waifs,

trustafarians,

and this guy hosting this party was an obvious fraud

because many of these influencers

are people that you follow‐‐

that you aspire to be‐‐

and also this rapper whose music that you listen to.

So when an opportunity presents itself

to get out of your parents' basement

and go be part of something that's culturally relevant,

you're gonna absolutely jump at that.

♪ ♪

JAKE: This tapped into all the biggest millennial trends.

‐ [laughing] Yeah!

MAN: Wow.

[laughing] Never been so happy in my life

to see this group of bozos.

CC: It's like history in the making.

I mean, everyone's supposed to be here,

like Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner...

OREN: Fyre Festival was supposed to be

the new Coachella,

the new Burning Man, the new whatever.

DANIEL: The whole thing is wrapped in sex appeal.

It's in the Bahamas on a private island

with a million‐dollar treasure hunt giveaway.

SETH: There was swimming with pigs

and cuisine unlike anything you've ever had.

It was gonna be an immersive experience

bordering on impossible.

JESSE: Exclusivity with unbelievable access

to premiere talent.

Kanye was gonna be performing at this festival.

JIA: People spent tens of thousands of dollars

on tickets.

STEWARD: ...and your seats in their upright position.

AUSTIN: We were all packed into a yellow school bus,

and people are thinking, "What's the worst thing

that could possibly happen?"

♪ ♪

‐ What's happening? There's no water over there.

Oh, Jesus. ‐ [laughing]

‐ I mean, this is just crazy.

There's trucks all over the place.

Still setting things up.

SETH: There were Amazon boxes everywhere

and there was a shower,

but you couldn't open your mouth

'cause the water was green.

‐ Yikes. Oh, get the fuck out of here.

Let's get the fuck out of here.

AVA: You can party like an Instagram model

and, you know, live the life of your dreams,

but on the beach, everyone was just sort of wrecked

and sunburnt and, like, this is not what I thought

was gonna happen.

‐ It's an absolute circus. I don't know what's going on.

♪ ♪

JAKE: People were like, "What did I get myself into?"

‐ We don't even know.

We're stranded. ‐ Yeah.

CC: Tents are blowing away.

All of the acts have pulled out.

MAN: It was a shitshow.

SETH: You know, like,

a camp counselor could have done a better job.

At one point, a guy was just standing

on this little plywood table, answering questions one by one

with a line of 100 people behind him.

REPORTER: Billy McFarland created the festival

and is blaming the disaster

on poor weather and bad planning.

‐ We took a big jump here and a big risk

and, uh, V1 has failed.

♪ ♪

‐ You have to start to wonder, what is going on with this guy?

‐ Let's take it back to where it all started.

REPORTER: Okay. ‐ So,

I'm a technology entrepreneur, but I've always really

been interested in payment tools and credit cards.

POLLY: If you ever see videos of him,

it's kind of like the same high‐energy spiel at all times.

‐ So it's a community‐oriented payment tool

that provides guidance, access, and experiences.

‐ It's like the ultimate used‐car salesman.

‐ I wanna get the key and show you guys in here.

We've actually developed our own little factory.

POLLY: And he really wanted to sell you a car.

And he'd give you a deal.

CALVIN: You're sitting there saying, like,

"I have no idea what this guy does,

"but I'm pretty certain,

"because I can't define it,

that it's not legitimate."

REPORTER: The 25‐year‐old entrepreneur

created the Fyre Festival with rapper Ja Rule.

MAN: For people who don't know what Fyre is,

tell the people what Fyre is.

‐ Like, so, just to ex‐‐ ‐ Hey, how you doing?

Uh, welcome. [laughs]

CALVIN: I guess once you attach Ja Rule to something,

you know it's legit.

I mean, that... [chuckles]

‐ Well, I'm gonna let my partner in crime here,

Billy McFarland, give y'all a introduction

of what Fyre is and‐‐and what it's bringing to the table.

‐ I see Fyre Fest as this big snowball

rolling down Scam Mountain...

♪ ♪

That has rolled up all of the previous scams

into one‐‐ the rise of social media,

the rise of the Silicon Valley ethos‐‐

you know, make it up first, suck up a lot of money.

Fyre Fest is all of these things zooming

straight at all of our brains,

landing straight in all of our Twitter feeds.

CALVIN: The cacophony of sound that they were able to create

using the influencers and their social media strategy

was so overwhelming

that not only did very smart financial guys give them money,

but, like, facts were just totally ignored

based off of the strength of their social media strategy.

VICKIE: What Fyre Festival did prove

is that the power of influence is real,

because at the time, there was nothing else but influence.

BEN: While social media was their tool,

it was ultimately their downfall.

REPORTER: Fyre Festival trending along with the hashtag

#FyreFraud.

MAN: Fyre becomes a meme in and of itself.

‐ Some people are calling it rich people's problems.

JIA: People like to see rich millennials get scammed.

‐ It would be perplexing and funny if it wasn't criminal.

And it is criminal. But it still is perplexing.

And still a little bit funny, but still horrible.

♪ ♪

‐ The Fyre Music Festival creator now arrested

and charged with wire fraud in a separate case.

And Erielle, you got a comment from the lawyer

for William McFarland? ‐ The attorney

just moments ago saying‐‐ and this is a quote‐‐

"When this is all over, you will see

"that he is hardly the villain

the government portrays him as."

♪ ♪

JAKE: The investigation against Billy McFarland

is being led by the Department of Justice,

and specifically the Southern District of New York,

which you might know from the show "Billions."

‐ Drop your credentials at the guards' desk

and get the fuck out of here!

♪ ♪

JESSE: The Southern District of New York

is the premiere office of the Department of Justice.

They consider themselves able to prosecute anything,

anywhere, anytime.

JAKE: Billy McFarland's attorneys

presented letters of support from friends and family.

All kinds of people felt compelled to come out.

"He is the most inspiring and motivating person

I have ever met aside from my mother."

MAN: "Creative, passionate, and exceedingly optimistic."

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "He is the smartest person I know."

BOTH: "Billy was and still is a visionary."

♪ ♪

ANASTASIA: I believe that we all make mistakes.

♪ ♪

And I believe in love. I love him.

I‐‐I do my best to support him.

I think he did really want that festival to happen,

and he did work very hard for it to happen.

♪ ♪

You can read, like, all the news,

but it's, like, all, like‐‐ it's all super bad

and super negative.

♪ ♪

He wanted to tell his story.

♪ ♪

‐ What's up? MAN: Welcome.

‐ Nice and dark and ominous.

♪ ♪

ANASTASIA: And he wanted to go deeper

than the festival failure.

♪ ♪

‐ I think it's really easy to play Monday morning quarterback

for myself right now, looking back saying,

"I should have done this, I should have done that."

And I certainly made a lot of mistakes,

and‐‐and there's no question about that, but...

♪ ♪

Before we had the worst luck, I think we had the best luck.

And, like, it sounds crazy, but so many things

had to go right to make it this big of a failure.

And everybody fully believed

that we were going to put on an event

that was going to change the landscape and deliver

an experience people would talk about for years.

There was no hidden secret. There was no hidden agenda.

We're all like, "Whatever it takes,

"we are all in, and let's go

and make this happen."

[pensive music]

♪ ♪

JIA: There's this idea that this is the model of success

in the millennial era.

You can become the biggest, buzziest company in the world,

where you have this moonshot vision,

and you figure it out later.

Because, like, why couldn't you do it?

[dial‐up modem ringing]

MAN: There are about 80 million of them born

between 1980 and 1995.

They're called millennials.

BOY: Wow, look at those cool graphics.

JIA: The millennial understanding of the world

has been shaped by extreme precarity.

[screaming and gunfire]

And now people want to construct their own reality.

‐ Do you know what we're fighting about?

There are people who... [overlapping shouting]

JIA: With the dream of being successful enough

that you are beyond accountability.

And Billy McFarland is the person that

is, like, baked in that oven and comes out fully formed

and does Fyre Fest.

♪ ♪

BILLY: I was raised in New Jersey,

and my two parents worked together

as real estate developers and we grew up

as a close family.

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "I am Billy McFarland's mother,

"and there is much that I would like you to know

"about my son.

"As a child, Billy was always ahead of the curve.

"He walked and talked well before the norm,

"was first to finish his math times tables,

"could swim in the ocean as a toddler,

was scuba diving at age ten."

BILLY: My first combination of technology and marketing

happened in second grade.

I was put next to, uh, a girl who I had a crush on.

And her crayon broke.

I said, "If you give me a dollar, I'll fix your crayon."

The school bought very basic Internet‐connected typewriters,

and I realized that this is the best way

to market my crayon business,

so I figured out the school's administrator password

and I started messing with them.

I changed the password and, like,

locked all the teachers out. So every time the AlphaSmart

was turned on, it would say, "For your broken crayons,

basically come and find me."

POLLY: I definitely think Billy was always inspired

by being a businessman, even if he's a teeny‐tiny

crayon‐based businessman.

[funky electronic music]

CALVIN: Billy McFarland came of age with the Internet.

BILLY: The Internet doesn't have parents.

It doesn't have teachers. It doesn't have rules.

No one really told you what was right or wrong.

MALE VOICE: Welcome. You've got mail.

JESSE: As this young man is growing up,

there's a huge boom.

MAN: The information technology revolution:

it's affecting the way we do business and live our lives.

And that's why it's so profitable.

‐ The investors are going crazy.

‐ To pass the time,

help yourself to some more stock.

BILLY: My first real company when I was in fifth grade

was a web‐posting company,

and I had three full‐time people working for me, uh,

in India.

I'm talking to people, like, entirely across the world

when my friends are focused on, like, kickball at recess.

I had, like, the worst fake deep voice on the planet.

I would pick up the phone and just never say how old I was‐‐

be like, "Hello?" ‐ Hello?

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "Billy has been gifted

"with both a blessing and a curse:

He can only think big."

POLLY: Billy thought that he was going to be Mark Zuckerberg

and that he was on the road to be Mark Zuckerberg

and that nothing would stop him.

BILLY: I went to college at Bucknell.

Bucknell had this, like, pitch competition,

and I created the content for Spling.

MAN: You just found a hilarious video,

delicious recipe, or even an interesting article online.

Now you want to share it with your friends.

What do you do?

‐ Spling was basically

a duplicate of Google+ kind of vibe.

‐ I'm Billy McFarland, the CEO of Spling.

I don't know if you've ever seen the video from demo day,

but the pitch for Spling didn't go so well.

Let's see a quick demo.

[awkward music]

Sorry, one second.

♪ ♪

Remember, Spling it. Thank you very much.

After that, we were urged to explore

new versions of our idea.

We moved to New York, and we were just so concerned

with, like, "What's the next step?

What's the next step?"

JAKE: When he moved to New York,

I think it was a moment where millennials

as a generation are struggling to understand

the world around them.

‐ It was the worst day on Wall Street.

JIA: All of the pillars of upward mobility

have been crumbling for decades.

REPORTER: More millennials are living with parents

than with spouses or partners.

JIA: You can't buy a house and settle down

because you can't afford one.

There is the rise of this, like,

insane college debt bubble.

CALVIN: There are fewer and fewer jobs where people can

not just better themselves but just sustain the status quo.

JAKE: This is what was happening,

and it was very clear

that Billy understood what his friends want.

BILLY: I was literally at dinner with friends

and we all split the bill, and we all had our

introductory debit cards, and this idea struck me.

And I'm like, "Wow, like, what if I could make these cooler?"

So I went and ordered a sheet of metal from China

and, like, magnetic tape and this, like,

giant sheet that was super thin and I found a way to copy

my debit card onto the sheet of metal.

And I did it and it worked, and I, like,

went down to the deli.

So I went and, like, bought something with this,

like, stupid card, and I'm like, "Shit, it works.

I can go to the store and‐‐and buy stuff with this."

And that was the genesis of the Magnises card.

[exciting music]

‐ Jessica, you're chasing a story about the millennials'

version of the black card. What do you got?

JESSICA: Billy McFarland wanted a life with the perks

of the black American Express card,

so he created it for himself. This is Magnises.

MAN: How did you come up with that name?

‐ Uh, the name is made up.

I think I spelled it wrong, though, 'cause, like,

it probably should have been M‐A‐G‐N‐E‐S,

but I spelled it M‐A‐G‐N‐I‐S,

so a lot of people said "Mag‐ness‐is," but whatever.

‐ What is Magnises? It's a card.

But it's more than that. ‐ It's a card.

It's a card. It's more than that.

‐ I don't know if it means magnet.

‐ Some meteorological element.

‐ Someone had a way better joke about it.

They go, "Well, it just means magnum penis, right?"

And I was like, "Yeah, that kinda works.

That makes sense."

‐ This card will piggyback off of your current credit card

with extra perks that you can't get anywhere else.

EMILY: The main selling point to me was this townhouse.

‐ This is the main floor.

It's really great‐‐a communal workspace during the day.

Then at night we move all the tables and chairs

out of the way, have a lot of events and speakers,

parties, dinners.

EMILY: You had this place to go to meet people like you

and I think if you're, like, new to the city,

that sounded cool. That sounded like,

"Oh, that's my way to make introductions."

In reality, the people who hung out there were not the people

that they advertised.

[quirky music]

It was, like, guys who lived in Murray Hill

that, if they could join an out‐of‐college fraternity,

they would.

BILLY: Grant was a Magnises member who called me one day,

yelling about 20 things we could improve on.

And we said, "Why don't you come and fix it for us?"

And that was the start of the relationship.

EMILY: So when Billy and Grant got connected,

it was like "The Office" except with, like,

no redeeming qualities.

‐ What is a business?

EMILY: Billy was Michael Scott. Grant was Dwight,

so, like, tattling right away‐‐ he'd be like, "Michael!"

‐ Michael! ‐ You know, like,

that was kind of like‐‐ he'd be like, "Billy!"

Grant made the Magnises marketing deck.

Like, one word would be "luxe." [chill trendy music]

Uh, "nuance."

"NYC."

We actually, like, started running out of time

because it's 152 pages, and at that point.

Grant just is flipping through the thing so fast.

"Luxe, NYC, blah, blah, blah, marketing."

And he was like a robot kind of like

going through it really fast.

But, like, we were expected to listen to this as if

this was Tim Cook giving the Apple Town Hall of the year.

JAKE: When I think about Magnises,

I think about Entertainment 720.

There is no actual business.

It's just guys being in business.

BOTH: ♪ We're flush with cash ♪

[dramatic music]

BEN: It's funny, but Billy knew how to reach out

to Silicon Valley, how to reach out

to private equity to get money

to fund his endeavors at a high level.

CALVIN: As he's building Magnises,

Billy meets Aubrey McClendon.

REPORTER: Aubrey McClendon is the CEO of Chesapeake Energy,

one of the country's most powerful

independent gas producers.

‐ We have discovered the equivalent

of two Saudi Arabias of oil.

CALVIN: Aubrey McClendon is a colorful figure.

BEN: Aubrey McClendon owned the Oklahoma City Thunder.

REPORTER: He is the outspoken, influential heir

of one of America's wealthiest families.

‐ In my mind he was, like, the best entrepreneur

I ever could have imagined.

He could walk into a room with 50 of the most power people

in the world, and he owned that room.

We had a meeting with Aubrey

about getting involved in Magnises.

We were at the Four Seasons in San Francisco.

We started, like, shooting the shit for a minute,

and I pull out the card and‐‐and dropped the card

on the table.

Of course he's the center of attention of the room,

and all the top VCs are there. All the guys are there.

Everybody wants to talk to Aubrey.

And he's there just clanging this card on the table,

just, like, throwing it down and, like,

taking pictures of it.

♪ ♪

A half hour later, and when I was on the plane,

he sent me over a term sheet to invest $500,000 in Magnises.

[hip‐hop music] And the rest is history.

[air horn blowing]

JAKE: After Aubrey McClendon invests in Magnises,

Billy drops money on influencers and musicians.

‐ He showed up with a bag of cash to pay Rick Ross,

and it really happened.

[explosion booms]

JAKE: As it turns out...

[air horn blows]

It doesn't take much to trick a New York City media reporter

into writing a story about how great your company is.

[air horns blowing]

BEN: There were positive articles that were influenced

heavily by publicists and marketing teams.

JAKE: These press stories end up turning Billy

into this image

of the next entrepreneurial god of New York City.

‐ They were just rerunning a press release, you know?

It's like, "Ooh, exclusive club for hot, elite millennials."

[quirky music]

JAKE: Right around this time, Billy meets Ja Rule,

who himself has had some problems with the law, um‐‐

‐ So, you spent two years in prison.

‐ Yeah, I went in on my state charge for the gun charge,

and they ran it concurrent with my... [quietly] Tax stuff.

[laughs]

♪ What's my motherfucking name ♪

‐ As an investor, when I heard Ja Rule was involved,

I immediately think of the inimitable Dave Chappelle.

‐ We got Ja Rule on the phone.

Let's see what Ja's thoughts are on this tragic‐‐

who gives a fuck what Ja Rule thinks

at a time like this, nigga? This is ridiculous.

‐ I don't know if you've seen this clip.

It's hysterical.

‐ Think when bad shit happens to me,

I'll be in the crib like, "Oh, my God.

"This is just terrible.

"Could somebody please find Ja Rule?

"Get a hold of this motherfucker so I can

make sense of all this. Where is Ja?"

JAKE: Ja Rule, like many other rappers,

is looking for the next big thing.

‐ Ja, what is this new look?

‐ I don't know, man.

She‐‐she want me to leave the street life alone.

Guess that's what I'm gonna do.

[quirky music]

EMILY: They gave him a role‐‐ like, a title technically,

but, like, just so when he was on camera he would be

associated with Magnises.

He had nothing to do with Magnises.

‐ So many celebrities become brand ambassadors

for something or other. Why'd you choose this?

‐ Uh, you know, it's‐‐ it's a very unique situation.

Whenever you can marry the affluent

with the less fortunate, you get the birth child...

‐ [laughs] How did‐‐wait, wait.

‐ Which is called hip‐hop.

‐ Okay, well, this isn't called hip‐hop.

This is‐‐this is called a credit card.

‐ Yeah, this is a credit card...

‐ This wasn't a viable or a sustainable business,

as best I or anyone with common sense would assume.

[dramatic percussion]

And then Billy gets sued by the owner of this townhouse

that Magnises was anchored out of

because he'd completely trashed the place.

EMILY: The townhouse was the big selling point,

and that wasn't part of it anymore.

At that time, Magnises needed quick cash.

Memberships weren't selling.

They kept trying to come up with ideas of what would sell,

what would make this cooler.

Billy started coming up with ideas that we thought

seemed at least shady.

Billy could get a lot of money quickly when he would try

to sell tickets, 'cause he would sell things

he knew people wanted even if he didn't actually have them.

He tried to sell access to a private JLo party,

and then he was saying he had exclusive tickets

for Jay‐Z and Beyoncé.

But, like, the worst ticket scam in my opinion

was for "Hamilton."

You could yell at him saying, like,

"There's no possible way you have 200 tickets for 'Hamilton'

one night. There's‐‐ It's absolutely impossible.

And he would say, "It's possible."

It would come to the night of, when people are like,

"Where are my tickets? It's the night of the show."

And he would, like, last minute buy them

on, like, StubHub for insane prices

and would give them out, like, literally in person.

I could see clearly, like,

Billy is gonna run this promotion,

get a ton of money from "Hamilton,"

and then he'll pay off the Beyoncé tickets

he sold earlier. And all the sudden he'd be like,

"By the way, we're selling Super Bowl tickets."

Because he had to pay for the Hamilton tickets.

BEN: I think ultimately, Magnises is what cemented

Billy's idea that he could really make money

from defrauding millennials.

JAKE: And then Aubrey McClendon‐‐

Billy's most important investor‐‐

becomes a sign of everything that goes wrong.

REPORTER: Aubrey McClendon, one of the best‐known

architects of the US shale boom,

indicted by a federal grand jury Tuesday

on conspiracy charges

linked to rigging the price of oil and gas leases in Oklahoma.

‐ Aubrey McClendon is a fraudster.

REPORTER: Chesapeake has had to borrow more than $6 billion

to stay afloat.

REPORTER: Chesapeake could be the next Enron.

JESSE: He's leading a company that is built

on a tissue of lies.

And eventually he's indicted for securities fraud.

‐ Police in Oklahoma are investigating the death

of a legendary energy titan.

Aubrey McClendon died yesterday in a fiery car crash

one day after being indicted.

[sinister music]

♪ ♪

‐ Yeah, um...

♪ ♪

I think I convinced myself for, like, a week

he wasn't actually dead.

I think that was, like, obviously wrong,

but I hit a mental block there.

♪ ♪

JAKE: This, in a nutshell,

marks the end of an era for Magnises

and the beginning of trouble for his company.

♪ ♪

But right around this time, Billy meets Carola Jain,

a very well‐off investor and the wife of Bob Jain,

who runs one of the biggest hedge funds in New York City.

Carola becomes one of Billy's most important

and core seed investors.

‐ I found out some of our coworkers were working

on a side business for Billy.

And we kind of were like, "Hey, like, that doesn't feel right."

♪ ♪

"Is he starting, like, another fraudulent business?"

♪ ♪

DELROY: When I first met Billy, I was on Norman's Cay.

I was a bartender there at MacDuff's Restaurant.

I'm like, "What the fuck these guys coming here to do?"

'Cause there's nothing on this island.

I think, "Well, let me just be quiet and do my job."

[blender whirring]

I'm the bartender. Let me get them drunk

'cause a drunk mind speaks a sober tongue.

And it happened.

♪ ♪

Billy said, "Bring out the laptop.

Show Delroy what you got."

BILLY: Our pitch was simple.

We want to bring music on this island

and allow hundreds of people

to come and experience the magic at one time.

And we were hoping to build this creative center

in the Bahamas where maybe our music artists would come

and record and models could come and shoot.

And we were hoping to have a year‐round creative center

that was culminated in this annual festival.

♪ ♪

‐ Said "What do you think? Can we pull this off?"

I looked at him.

I was like, "Billy, uh, uh‐uh."

[engine idling]

They're just like, "I'll be back in, like, two weeks."

So I'm like, "Yeah, right. Whatever."

[dramatic music]

AVA: People like Billy McFarland were not unique

to the Bahamas, you know? This is not the first time

that we've had someone purport to be something

and they're not.

Because of our proximity and our high visibility,

the Bahamas have always been a first‐stop shop for scammers.

We're a country of industrious, hardworking people,

but unemployment is incredibly high.

We're still a developing country.

WOMAN: Call 1‐800‐Sandals.

AVA: The culture of exclusive resorts,

this ultra‐luxe lifestyle in an environment

where there's so much poverty‐‐ there is a level of collusion

and pay‐for‐play and kickbacks involved.

[water splashes]

It's so ripe for fraud.

♪ ♪

DELROY: I'm riding past the runway

and I see this plane coming in.

Billy said, "Hey, Delroy, I told you I'd be back."

This other dude walked off the plane.

It's Ja Rule.

And apparently, Ja is the face for the festival.

And he came to make sure the shit kick off the right way.

‐ I am cofounder of Fyre.

Me and my‐‐me and my brother, Billy.

♪ ♪

And this is what we call a moonshot.

[laughs]

‐ I checked the calendar. Checked the date.

All I did was just scratch my head.

I was like, "Boy, I don't know if this shit can happen."

‐ Get ready, baby. Fyre Festival coming in April.

The best shit in the world.

♪ ♪

DAVE: I'm in the music business.

Everyone talks.

And we started hearing these rumors that Ja Rule

was working on this high‐end event in the Bahamas

called Fyre Festival

and it was gonna be really expensive‐‐

villas, private yacht rides, exclusive dinners with artists.

This utopian concept that's about culture and art

and music‐‐

that kind of festival culture that, "We could create

our own society here temporarily."

It started with Woodstock and Monterey Pop.

‐ This is our generation, man. We're all together, man.

It's groovy.

DAVE: Fast forward to the '80s and Live Aid.

‐ We love you!

DAVE: And then in the '90s,

Perry Farrell launched Lollapalooza.

And there was Burning Man.

But in 1999, Goldenvoice launched Coachella.

There was no VIP area. There was no glamping.

It was a site in the desert and hot dogs and porta potties.

That's really the start of the modern festival movement

in North America.

But now Coachella is $100 million,

almost high‐end luxury event.

It seems like, you know, only the very wealthy

can afford to really have a comfortable experience.

JIA: Coachella is about putting on your deeply inappropriate

feather headdress and, like, posing in front

of the Ferris wheel.

It's like, "I've got money. I've got tons of friends.

I'm, like, young and attractive and carefree."

And the music festival's a great place to display that.

And there a lot of people in the millennial generation

that are interested in experiences

that are effectively, like,

pretext for really good Instagrams.

‐ [yelps]

‐ And I hate to speak on behalf of millennials,

'cause there's nothing worse than a millennial

speaking on behalf of millennials.

‐ I'm sorry, who are you again?

ANNOUNCER: "The Millennials."

‐ Some of the stereotypes about millennials are true.

‐ Taking a break from social media.

JAKE: We are obsessed with our phones.

ALL: No!

‐ We are a little bit narcissistic.

‐ I think that I may be the voice of my generation.

JAKE: A little bit arrogant as a generation,

I guess you could say.

CALVIN: But certainly, our generation

loves to be a part of the hype.

We identify ourselves with what we're attached to

or who's involved or who follows us or who likes us

or who comments. "Do I have a blue checkmark?"

"Am I trending at the right event?

You're either tagged in posts or you're sharing memes

or you're sending videos that everyone can relate to

and laugh, like Star Wars kids or dramatic gopher

or Antoine Dodson.

You see what everyone else is doing.

The fact that you're not there creates this fear

that you're less of an individual.

BILLY: I think the world's always been where

there's always somebody smarter,

more successful, better‐looking,

taller, whatever than you, but people didn't see it

as much as they're exposed to it now.

They weren't in your face all day long.

And that's what drives a lot of these things.

‐ It's tapping into FOMO‐‐ fear of missing out,

which is kind of a core thing

for millennials.

‐ If I missed out on chili and cheese,

I'd have a bad case of FOMO. ‐ FOMO?

‐ Fear of missing out.

‐ So you're, like, a millennial?

JIA: FOMO is something that was invented

by the social media paradigm.

It's this underlying anxiety where if you don't continue

to escalate your visibility,

your identity will start

to crumble in pieces.

VICKIE: Millennials are spending around two‐hours‐plus

a day on social media.

‐ Every day, I start by hitting up Facebook, Twitter,

Tumblr, and Instagram.

‐ If you're not relevant in social media,

if you're not talked about, you don't exist.

Instagram, social media marketing,

influencer marketing is the most impactful form

of marketing for an entire generation.

So, an influencer is anyone with a social following.

There are plenty of people who are models and celebrities

that have influence, like Kendall Jenner,

Hailey Baldwin, Bella Hadid.

We call them macros,

but those are celebrity influencers.

JIA: What an influencer is is someone who has effectively

monetized their identity.

That is their work:

the performance of an attractive life.

That is their job.

‐ I'm Austin Mills. I do a lot of TV hosting.

I do some social media influencing.

‐ My name's Alyssa Lynch.

I have almost half a million followers on Instagram.

♪ ♪

SETH: So, my name is Seth.

[music winds down]

‐ I don't know who that is.

SETH: I created this influencer character,

William Needham Finley IV,

the most influential influencer.

I'm just kinda poking fun at the whole influencer culture.

It's all a joke.

[quirky music]

JAKE: Everybody is now an influencer in a certain sense.

Everybody is a brand.

‐ Um, when I say "my brand," um, I just mean

kind of, like, the lifestyle that I want to live.

So, positivity, um...

♪ ♪

‐ Health, wellness, and honestly just, like,

positivity.

VICKIE: I look at influencers as really brave people.

They're sharing a lot of information

and they're sort of taking one for the team

for all of us to relate to them.

And FuckJerry was one of the original influencers.

REPORTER: Believe it or not, 27‐year‐old Elliot Tebele

makes memes for a living.

JIA: FuckJerry's part of the same ecosystem

that produced influencer marketing in the first place.

JAMES: If you wanna learn how to dominate social media

and how you make money off of it, watch.

MAN: We come up with campaigns for big brands.

We produce the pictures and the videos.

We post it to their Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube

because you've got all of these brands that are trying

to get in on the viral meme game.

These big brands don't know how to think like we do.

‐ You now have 30 million followers across

the entire Jerry network.

‐ The campaign objective is to truly shift mainstream opinion.

‐ What's up, fam? ‐ He's the CEO.

He's a lot smarter than he looks.

VICKIE: It doesn't surprise me that Fyre would turn

to a social media marketing entity like FuckJerry

because that's what they do best.

OREN: I was on the FuckJerry design team.

The first client that they gave me was Fyre Festival.

This was supposed to be the new Coachella,

the new Burning Man, the new whatever.

And I was designing it.

[light music]

I came to a meeting with Fyre.

In the meeting it was like, uh, you know, two agencies

never met each other but bidding kind of

for the same business. So it was very, like...

[clicks tongue] "Who are you guys?"

Like, "We don't want anything to do with you."

The Fyre team said they wanted to do a music festival

in the Bahamas, but they wanted to do it

in only six months.

I'm like, "Whoa."

[light music dies, restarts]

The second we stepped outside onto the street

with the other agency, it was kind of a quick exchange

of, like‐‐ [exhales sharply]

"This is crazy."

Like, and both of us were like, "This can't happen."

Like, "This will never work."

Saying it out loud on the street just‐‐and being like,

"Well, let's, uh‐‐ let's just do it.

It'll probably be fine."

Like, "We're, you know‐‐ We're both pros at what we do.

What could go wrong?"

♪ ♪

JAKE: Billy understood the sense that you need to be part

of this world of status‐‐ that you need to be

where influencers and Instagram stars are.

BEN: And so what did he do?

He stole money from people, basically,

and did a commercial.

MICHAEL: I get a call for a job in the Bahamas.

What they told us was this client was pretty much here

to party.

‐ Yo, everybody come here. Yo.

‐ Cameras, get us coming up on him.

‐ Get right here. ‐ Hey, the cameras‐‐

‐ Yo.

‐ And so we needed to keep it professional and get

the commercial out of the shoot even if things around us

were chaotic.

MAN: When are we leaving? Right now?

MAN: Yeah, we're leaving right now.

‐ It was one of the more ridiculous,

ambitious creative treatments that I'd seen.

Included on it was, you know, getting the models

swimming with sharks in open water.

That M. I. A. music video on the runway with the cars

where they're all, like, riding sideways‐‐

we wanted to do something like that with golf carts

on an airplane runway.

♪ ♪

Pretty quickly became clear that it was unfeasible.

Everyone kept talking, "When are we gonna go

to the pig island? I'm excited for pig island."

Okay, I guess it's an island with a bunch of pigs.

And as soon as we get there, they're all swimming up

and someone's feeding them beer

and thinks it's funny.

And they're‐‐you know, they're like pigeons

except they're pigs with mouths and teeth.

‐ [screams]

‐ [screaming, laughing]

‐ Oh, my God.

‐ Get down here. Get down here

Back up, back up.

MICHAEL: Chanel Iman actually fell 'cause she's getting bit

by a pig.

The pigs at one point bit Billy in the balls

and he's running off, and people are just laughing.

And my point guy was Grant.

Um, he was just overly excited about pretty much everything.

DAVE: Somebody had leaked to us this thousand‐word email

that Grant sent out to his staff about how the video

should be scored.

[Ludwig van Beethoven's "Symphony No. 5"]

♪ ♪

[man screaming]

Someone created a composition based on it,

and this is the actual piece.

I'm going to read the actual letter.

[voice overlapping] "I want to use odd meters

and compounded time signatures."

"Global music elements."

"Extremely constant key signatures."

He mentioned using a xylophone;

a surdo, which is a Brazilian drum;

"tiko drums," especially during the "more exploratory

elements" of the composition.

[upbeat music]

It just reeks of disconnection from reality.

♪ ♪

OREN: Once video production was done,

FuckJerry has to market this thing.

My whole idea was like, stop the Internet.

And so to do that, you have to kind of

figure out a way, in this time of advertising, how to

stop somebody who's scrolling at speeds that are like‐‐

you have less than a second, most times.

Every influencer that you follow,

every art account, every food page,

whatever they're posting is not neon orange.

That's a stopper.

That's gonna stop as fast as you're scrolling.

And now I've got your attention.

‐ We think about visual disruption all the time.

You have a ton of sameness in your feed,

and something like an orange square creates pause.

BILLY: We had 400 musicians, athletes, models,

actors at the same time post this orange tile to Instagram.

OREN: And everyone that you love and follow is now

feeding into it, and you're going crazy.

You need the answers.

BILLY: Our target customers when they were browsing

their Instagram feed, they were like,

"What is this?

Why is there orange all over my feed?"

CALVIN: These guys figured out a way to optimize

social media‐‐ almost weaponize it.

OREN: When you click the orange tile,

it linked to the video.

And it worked perfectly.

JAKE: Almost immediately, the promo video

goes completely viral.

MAN: The actual experience exceeds all expectations

and is something that's hard to put into words.

All these things that may seem big and impossible are not.

It gives people that type of energy.

That type of power.

JIA: The promo video was perfectly generic fantasia

of what an Instagram come to life would be.

It was nothing but backdrop, like, montage‐friendly bliss.

EMILY: The boat is going across the blue waters of the Exuma

and all of these, like, really hot models are, like,

dancing around and then there's just random white guys there

for, like, who knows what reason.

CALVIN: Beautiful women on a deserted island?

Yeah, 100%, I'm going. Take my money.

Here, I‐‐I will throw my credit card at it.

DAVE: You see these super models on jet skis

and you're thinking like, "Wow, I really want to be there."

CALVIN: It was going to be on a deserted island

owned by Pablo Escobar.

Man, that's about as sexy as it gets.

OREN: Pablo Escobar's actually, like, a criminal

who's murdered people brutally.

And I was getting messages‐‐ again on Instagram‐‐

private messages from people telling me their parents

were murdered by Pablo Escobar, and I'm the‐‐

I'm the social media guy. What am I supposed to...

[dramatic music]

CALVIN: Then Billy convinces Kendall Jenner,

one of the largest influencers in the world,

to post about the Fyre Festival.

VICKIE: Kendall Jenner is defining a generation.

She can take a brand from zero awareness

to a brand that has a phenomenal amount

of brand equity with one social media post.

CALVIN: By some accounts, she gets paid $250,000

per post.

‐ I think 250's a steal.

‐ To, like, post how many Instagrams?

One?

CALVIN: The point of Kendall's post was to announce

that G. O. O. D. Music was involved with the festival.

OREN: But there was this huge meltdown on the Fyre side.

"We're ready to go." Everyone's freaking out.

"No, hold on. Hold on."

"Launch it." "No, don't"‐‐like...

we eventually got it up.

CALVIN: And so when she does post about the Fyre Festival,

she gets millions of impressions.

So the presupposition, at least on social media,

was that Kanye was gonna be performing at this festival.

DAVE: Who would wanna miss seeing Kanye in the Bahamas

with Kendall Jenner? I mean, talk about

the FOMO movement.

Like, it elevated it to a ten.

‐ I had influencers begging to go

because all the other influencers are going.

CALVIN: You're in Lower Manhattan,

where you're freezing.

You got an election that just upended

the political environment.

The thing that you're absolutely focused on

is escaping from that.

And so people are dying to be a part of something

that was going to be the‐‐ the Woodstock

of the millennial generation.

‐ People would message me things like,

"I quit my job because my boss wouldn't give me time off."

"I sold, like, everything I own."

And just listing all these crazy actions that they took

just to go to this fantasy island festival.

But there was nothing built.

JAKE: And mind you, this is January,

so there's only four months to actually pull this off.

♪ ♪

CALVIN: You could not produce a festival on a deserted island

in a foreign country with such a truncated time frame.

It's not going to happen.

‐ Billy started panicking. Billy's like, "No. Shit."

He said, "Listen, people are actually buying into it,

so‐‐so we have to have a festival."

New Year's Eve, we had a dinner party in Staniel Cay.

‐ Here's to living like movie stars,

partying like rock stars. Billy?

BILLY: And fucking like porn stars.

[laughter]

[excited chatter]

DELROY: After everybody got done, I stood up.

I said, "Okay, can I have some‐‐

like, a moment of silence?" It's like, "Yeah. What's up?"

I said, "Okay, everybody, wine, dine, eat, drink.

"Who didn't fuck got suck? Who didn't suck

"had a good fuck? Good.

"Now as of tomorrow,

"you guys need to start making your phone calls,

"dealing with the festival

to get this shit to start coming in now."

Everybody looked at me, and they laughed.

They said, "Delroy, sit down, man."

They said, "Why are you so worried?

We got this. We're straight. We're good with this, man."

I'm like, "Okay."

♪ ♪

JAKE: As it turns out,

Billy doesn't actually have a site for the festival.

So Billy goes island shopping.

[dreamy ukulele music]

CALVIN: You know, Johnny Depp has an island.

Richard Branson has an island.

An island is a very aspirational thing to own.

But in the Bahamas,

buying an island is sort of an involved process.

Under a truncated time frame,

if you had all the money in the world,

it takes several months, if not years.

AVA: If any investors had really done

any real sort of research, they would've realized

that there's not really much infrastructure here,

so they would have to create all of the infrastructure.

We're looking at a year of planning and construction.

CALVIN: You don't buy an island in February

to then host a party in April.

That is an impossible thing to do.

♪ ♪

JAKE: According to our accounts,

Billy hops on his jet with a cook

who claims the perfect island is actually Great Exuma.

[swanky music]

AVA: Exuma is one of the more bustling islands.

For Bahamians, our hospitality‐‐

our ability to be great hosts‐‐ is a part of our pride.

CALVIN: It actually has an airport;

there's an established hotel;

there is some infrastructure; but the problem is,

this site is a complete gravel pit.

♪ ♪

AVA: It's nothing like that trailer that they shot.

It's just very barren and just very concrete rubble.

CALVIN: When they posted the photo of the island,

it's like, "Here's Fyre Island!"

And I found that this is a parking lot

on an undeveloped portion

outside of Sandals Emerald Bay resort.

If you Google "Sandals Emerald Bay,"

you will also find "Fyre Island."

♪ ♪

I mean that‐‐that‐‐genius.

I'm seeing these things, and it's like,

"This is getting ridiculous." Like, "These guys are lying.

This is‐‐no way this is going on."

‐ Anyone who'd ever been involved with event production

would have understood that this wasn't possible.

Like, a wedding planner would have known, like,

"Absolutely no way."

DANIEL: My first job for Fyre Festival

was just an assessment for them.

The scale of this project was enormous,

but typically, you'd have this kind of planning effort

around a festival of this scale 18 months in advance,

not four months in advance.

FELIX: When I was brought onboard,

we were a month and a half out.

I don't know how they thought

that we were gonna be able to do this.

I‐‐I just don't know.

And if it was gonna happen,

we were gonna have to work 24‐hour days.

HENRY: We tried to pick up our pace.

We started to work day and night.

Some days, I came off the site

at 3:00 at night and I went back at 7:00.

NICK: I was brought on to be a general store manager

and a sourcing coordinator.

We were all working 18‐hour days, 19‐hour days.

I was sleeping an average of three hours a night.

JAKE: Another huge problem is that the two weekends

that Billy has chosen for the festival

happen to coincide with the Exuma Family Regatta...

[dramatic music]

Which is a sailing regatta.

It's the biggest event that happens annually.

DONALD: We have the national regatta going on.

That's bigger than Christmas here.

♪ ♪

‐ The organizer was told,

"This is not the right time to do this."

JAKE: The problem is, with this regatta,

there's not gonna be any cars.

There's not gonna be any hotels.

It'll be difficult to host

thousands of people for the festival.

[tense music]

He's warned that he should cancel it‐‐

that it just can't come together.

DELROY: And Ja Rule came down, and he saw it for himself.

He pulled me aside. He's like, "Yo, Delroy.

"Just be straight up, dawg.

Is this festival gonna happen? What'd you think?"

All I did was just scratch my head.

I was just like, "Ja, it's really not gonna happen."

‐ Here's to living life... [laughter]

Like motherfucking movie stars.

MAN: So Ja Rule didn't know anything that was going on?

‐ I was in charge of the festival,

and I made the decision to keep it going‐‐to‐‐to‐‐

to‐‐I was in charge, and so it's on me.

But...yeah.

MAN: But he was there with you on the island frequently.

‐ Uh, he‐‐yup, he was on the island.

MAN: Did he tell you, "Billy, we can't do this.

We need to cancel"?

‐ I'm not gonna talk about

our different private conversations,

but, you know, we've had many conversations,

as well as I did with the rest of the team,

and those were the decisions we made.

CALVIN: And so they didn't cancel the festival,

but what happened is the story kept getting bigger.

And then people I knew, you know,

you know, started buying GA passes.

But what I think Billy figured out very quickly

was that he was not gonna be able to throw this festival

with the number of people that were buying GA passes

for the cost that he thought it was gonna be.

And so ultimately, they just said, "Well, it's sold out,

"so the only thing that you can buy now

are the premium passes."

‐ So Grant designed these, like, villas.

♪ ♪

I think he just used AutoCAD.

[pinging and beeping]

CALVIN: And the whole thing sort of became an ad hoc

"We're gonna sell one of one for this.

We have two villas available for this."

You know, "The Dolphin Villa is available

for $25,000."

DAVE: I remember there was a $250,000 package.

‐ But those villas did not exist‐‐

the ones that had been marketed

just straight up weren't‐‐ not even there.

JIA: Billy might have very well believed, you know, like,

"There's gotta be some company that'll set up a villa

for me for super cheap." I mean, it's like,

"Why can't we Amazon Prime this or something?"

[awkward music]

JAKE: These guys were just selling villas

because they needed another $25,000

to pay the production and stage guys.

JAKE: In fact, very quickly after the festival,

I acquired a trove of thousands of emails

detailing the inner workings of the Fyre Festival.

What they show is that right around this time,

Billy is so short of cash and he's trying desperately

to figure out how to pay everybody off

that he begins engaging in criminal acts and wire fraud.

He's securing services

by promising vendors wire transfers.

He's sending screenshots of a confirmation page

but the tracking number is cut off

and he's not really wiring the money.

♪ ♪

‐ It just seemed like every day,

we'd wake up with an issue, solve it by the next morning,

and then a new one would pop up,

and it was just playing this Whac‐a‐Mole game

where we kept solving the problems,

kept solving the problems, kept solving the problems

and I guess gained a little bit of confidence from that,

thinking everything in the world was solvable.

♪ ♪

CALVIN: And then I started hitting up

my friends in the music industry who were announced

as headliners at the festival, saying, "Are you being paid?"

DAVE: They had Blink‐182.

Major Lazer was playing.

Diplo. Lil Yachty.

And you had G. O. O. D. Music.

All these really big artists

are gonna demand payment upfront.

‐ And the information I'm getting from them is,

"No, they're not paying on the terms that we disclosed."

‐ I spoke to a number of agents who said

Fyre Festival went into breach almost from day one,

were not making payments, following wire instructions,

it was late, there were excuses.

CALVIN: So I'm watching this thing unfold from afar,

but what I didn't know was that

the festival was basically just a big promotion

for Billy and Ja's bigger idea, which was the Fyre app.

CALVIN: The Fyre app is a booking app

so you can rent out celebrities to appear at your events,

and I think this was sort of

the Tinder for booking talent.

You'd swipe right and make an offer on Coldplay,

and Coldplay would either accept and swipe right

or swipe left on you, and then

you guys would be linked and then, you know,

you'd have them playing at Timmy's bar mitzvah.

A very dear friend sent me a term sheet

from Comcast Ventures to Fyre Media.

It was for a significant amount of money‐‐

a really meaningful valuation.

But he was just indicating that

the app was far more profitable than it actually was.

And that's really when it turned from something

of rich millennials getting picked off

to something that became, like, a significant financial crime.

And so at this point,

I have a thesis that this is a fraud.

So I called Comcast Ventures, and I said, "Look,

"you gotta trust me. It's not legitimate.

"Just do me this favor.

"Promise me that you won't write a check to this company

until after the festival occurs."

And to their credit, you know, they ultimately didn't invest.

But still, more tickets are getting sold.

And the more money people were spending on this thing,

you know, the more I felt like,

"Hey, someone has got to stand up and say,

'This isn't real.'" And so I created

the anonymous Twitter account FyreFraud,

and I just started posting what I knew to be factual.

♪ ♪

OREN: We would sit in meetings with the Fyre team,

and we advised them to stay away from Twitter

because there was, like, an account

that basically called them out.

The guy would start talking to other people

and connecting dots together in the comments.

And I think everyone in the room kind of had, like,

a little thing on their mind, like, "Yeah, you're right."

Like, "How is this gonna work?"

How are 20,000 people getting to this island

when you're pitching it as

Cessna planes are what's bringing you there?

People are like, "Eh, someone will figure it out."

Like, "It's fine."

This cliff is really high.

If people are drunk,

they could just fall into this water.

They didn't even think, like, "Maybe we need a fence."

I would say, "Where's the beach?"

And they'd be like, "Oh, the beach is five miles away."

We'd be like, "Oh...uh...

"this could actually be, like, a failure, I think.

Could it?" And everyone would be like,

"Could it? Could it?"

VICKIE: If you're a business partner in this

and you have the information

that this is gonna be a shitstorm,

you should tell somebody.

OREN: So there were a few vendors who dropped out.

For everybody, this is a red flag.

This is one of those things that you kind of question,

"If they're doing something, why aren't we?"

But it would always come back to, like, "Nah," and...

VICKIE: If it were my agency and I didn't think

that this was something I could put my name behind,

I would've dropped out.

OREN: There's so much momentum,

so much money, so much force behind everything

that it's like, "This train's not stopping."

CALVIN: You can say in hindsight

that this is very easily a fraud,

but there's a point at which I questioned,

like, "Am I wrong? Am I crazy?"

I needed some of the validation

that an actual journalist could provide,

so I called "The Wall Street Journal,"

and I say, "Here's everything I know.

You need to put a stop to this thing,"

because these guys were not running an honest operation.

And they printed it in "The Wall Street Journal."

Okay, I've done my civic duty. We have killed this thing.

That's good enough for me. And I was wrong.

They were unfazed.

In fact, they were only emboldened.

They hit back with a counterpunch

of what can only be described as a social media blitz.

Somebody would post a question on the thing.

The question would immediately get deleted.

‐ Anytime there would be anything that was "distasteful"

or calling Fyre out on anything.

It was always a matter of,

"Go to that source and eliminate it."

‐ If you're asked, as a media company,

to start deleting things, you‐‐that's a red flag.

OREN: Instantly flagged words about "lineup,

"lineups, performers, details, info,

flights, fraud, stupid, scam"‐‐

"festival," even. "Festival" was blocked.

It got that bad. ‐ They would say, "Hey,

"like, I haven't gotten my flights confirmed.

What's going on?" And it would be,

that person would then get blocked from the account.

OREN: And then I had to make this list again in all caps

because Grant didn't believe that it wasn't case‐sensitive.

♪ ♪

CALVIN: They were so good at silencing the dissenters

that I'm screaming this from a rooftop,

and there's no one listening.

♪ ♪

DELROY: Billy was running out of money,

'cause I heard him on the phone talking to one of the investors

and, like, this dude was begging.

"Um, I need, like, um, a mill?"

POLLY: Someone was investing in the Fyre app

and the Fyre Festival.

Billy created a spreadsheet and wrote in "musical act,

thousands paid. Musical act, thousands paid."

MAN: So Lil Wayne was on the platform?

‐ Every artist in your‐‐ in the‐‐

in materials that we created as a team was on the platform.

MAN: Jamie Foxx was on the platform?

‐ Uh, as again‐‐once again, every artist that we created

in the materials was on the platform.

POLLY: But the reality is

that there were never thousands of acts booked

and there were never millions of dollars paid.

It was about $57,000 total.

Even worse, he alleged that he owned Facebook shares

to the tune of over $2 million.

In reality, he had over 1,000 bucks in there.

And after Billy submitted these doctored loan documents,

this investor put $800,000

on the line for Billy.

‐ [laughing]

‐ He hung up. He said, "Delroy,

"put it here, man.

Let's go Jet‐Skiing."

[racing bass line]

["Misirlou" by Dick Dale & the Del Tones]

‐ ♪ Ha, ha, ha ♪

JAKE: Despite all of the warning signs,

as even the most basic things just can't come together,

Billy becomes obsessed with an idea

of bringing a pirate ship to the Bahamas.

‐ [scoffs] Like, what are you gonna‐‐

what do you need a pirate ship for?

You're als‐‐you're‐‐ you're drowning in debt.

You're literally drowning in debt.

You can't even see.

BEN: He could sit in the cannonball

and you could shoot him and he would do three 360s,

throw out a bunch of money,

pour the drinks in everybody's mouth,

and say, "Billy's here!"

JAKE: The team is really, really against this idea,

but Billy is so obsessed with it

that they go through the process

of trying to find it anyway.

There was an urgent email about the bathrooms‐‐

that instead of having these luxurious bathrooms,

they're gonna have to try to ship in porta potties.

And there's this great email that I love.

The quote is, "Well, nobody's eating,

so nobody's pooping."

DELROY: And then they order 2‐million dollars' worth

of booze.

Who the fuck orders 2‐million dollars' worth

of booze, dawg?

You know the duty on liquor in the Bahamas?

45% of $2 million.

I was like...

‐ Okay, and just a couple of remaining items.

‐ So then Billy took out this loan

from someone named Ezra Birnbaum.

‐ Please indicate here if I look like a schmuck to you.

‐ I'm gonna say no.

POLLY: Ezra Birnbaum gives a loan for $3 million.

The loan had a maximum interest rate of 120%.

The interest on the loan amounted to $600,000

in three months.

He needed to make a payment of $1/2 million within 16 days.

‐ I‐‐I was a big boy. I knew what I was getting into.

And, you know, if I signed something

that doesn't make‐‐it doesn't sound smart financially,

that's on me, and it's‐‐ no one made me do that.

DAVE: But about a week before the festival was to take place,

attendees started receiving this email.

The email said, "This is a cashless event,

"and you'll be paying for the festival

using a wristband."

You load the wristband with money,

and then whenever you wanna buy anything,

you scan the wristband and it's debited from the account.

SETH: The directions in the email

said you were required

to put something on it.

"We recommend at least $300 per day."

People asked me, "Are those red flags?"

And I thought, "I don't know.

I've never planned a music event before."

DAVE: Whenever he's doing a scam,

it kind of always gets in this, like, realm of believability

because festivals do use cashless wristbands.

MAN: Did the decision to make the wristbands

and have people upload cash have anything to do

with your loan to Ezra Birnbaum?

‐ Uh...

DAVE: Our reporting found

that plan itself raised about $2 million.

FELIX: Every day, it was something new.

Everyone was very stressed out.

There were a lot of people that weren't paid.

DIALLO: And I remember one day in particular,

we were out there working, and all of the sudden,

I see a cop show up and they're shutting down

the job site.

Why? Because these guys aren't paying national insurance.

[dramatic music]

FELIX: A week before the festival,

everyone seems to know that this is not going to happen.

‐ Seven days in advance,

we knew that we didn't have enough accommodations

for guests, and now the slippery slope begins.

♪ ♪

AVA: The contractor was begging for more time,

and they were like, "No. There's no more time."

DANIEL: And you don't have radio communication.

Why? Because the guy didn't pay the customs bill.

♪ ♪

OREN: The FuckJerry team was still posting stuff.

I could say, "I'm scared."

I could say, "This is dangerous."

It won't change anything

'cause the festival has to happen.

FELIX: It was chaos. At the end, I was like,

"This shit ain't happening.

I'm getting a flight out of here."

NICK: People started to have breakdowns.

People started to have panic attacks.

‐ No idea what they were doing. ‐ It was a shitshow.

‐ Just chaos and anarchy.

FELIX: The night before, we worked through the night.

We were driving back to the house.

It's, like, 3:00 a.m. at this point

and it starts to rain, and we're like, "Okay.

It might just be light rain." And then...

♪ ♪

NICK: And it started monsooning.

We all started crying of laughter.

It was, like, hours before the first people

were supposed to get here.

‐ And then thunder and then the lights go out

and the roads look like they're flooded.

I thought to myself, "This is an act of God."

And, you know, it was kind of like...

‐ That's it. That's‐‐that's it.

It's two hours from now. We're fucked.

♪ ♪

[alarm blares]

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

DAVE: Before Fyre Festival,

there was definitely some disastrous festivals.

[crowd shouting]

The Hells Angels stabbing someone at Altamont Speedway

with the Rolling Stones.

MAN: Everybody, just cool out!

DAVE: And then Woodstock 1999,

it was almost like this apocalyptic event.

Whenever a festival fails, it's something about it

that really fascinates people.

So fast‐forward to today.

We are at high alert.

[alarm blaring]

We didn't know what was gonna happen.

We just knew we had to tune in.

So I basically set up a little mini war room.

‐ We are at DEFCON 1. MAN: DEFCON 1.

‐ Well, okay, so the war room was at my house.

It was just me, but I had the computer up.

I was watching different Twitter feeds.

Anybody who was gonna go to Fyre Fest,

I was following them.

‐ It is Thursday, officially the day of my flight to Fyre.

‐ We're about to go to Fyre Festival.

CC: So this Fyre Festival, right,

it's like history in the making.

It's gonna be interesting one way or another.

‐ Going to the Bahamas. Wow.

SETH: We got an email Thursday on morning that said

they were still putting things together

so you might see some trucks,

you might see some people moving some stuff around,

and just kind of bear with them.

We even joked and, like, bought toilet paper

before we went and thought, you know,

"This might end up being currency."

And then while we were waiting in the airport,

we saw that Blink 182 had tweeted out

that they were not gonna play.

"Well, one band has backed out, but that's just one band."

Everything was gonna be fine, right?

AUSTIN: [sighs] I'm saying my prayers right now.

Could be amazing. Could be a disaster.

STEWARD: And your seats in their upright positions.

Thank you very much.

‐ All right, we are here in the "private jet."

GIRL: [laughs]

‐ It's actually worse than, like, really, like,

being, like, low, low economy class.

[awkward music]

♪ ♪

AUSTIN: There were some people already on the island,

including a couple of our friends.

But our friends were redirected to another place on the island,

which was one of the nicer parts.

DANIEL: They decided that they would ship

all their first three planes

to somebody else's resort.

‐ Okay, so we got the three cowboys in a row.

OREN: I went down to the Bahamas

with the FuckJerry guys.

We're at that side party that they threw everyone to.

This is weird.

This already seemed like a nosedive.

You could tell everyone's like, "All right.

Could we go do the thing, like, now?"

Planes are landing and people are showing up.

‐ We're here!

[excited chatter]

AUSTIN: We were all packed into the yellow school bus.

SETH: So a maybe 10‐ or 15‐minute drive,

and right as soon as you get to the entrance...

WOMAN: [sobs] Oh, God. MAN: Oh, my God.

WOMAN: Oh...

Oh, God.

AUSTIN: A girl next to me on the bus

started bawling and crying.

WOMAN: [crying] Turn around.

MAN: There's no bed in that tent.

There's no beds in the tents.

WOMAN: Amber was like, "This isn't funny!"

[chatter]

SETH: It was just gravel, mattresses stacked up

along the road.

MAN: That's an air mattress. I see an air mattress.

AUSTIN: I mean, this is just crazy.

There's, like, 50 tents that are ready,

and all the rest aren't.

SETH: There was plenty of liquor.

There were just pallets of liquor bottles

sitting next to kiosks that said "bar."

‐ What's happening? There's no water over there.

Oh, Jesus.

Maybe we all get to burn it down at the end?

[laughs] We just burned all of our money.

SETH: This is not what we signed up for.

OREN: The first thing I saw was, "These are FEMA tents.

What have I done?" My child is like Satan.

This is such a disaster, but I heard that

some influencers actually got villas.

Like, mansions.

‐ Look at this kitchen!

We actually did have a villa.

We felt real bad.

[dance music]

[laughs]

[tense hip‐hop beats]

AUSTIN: I hate you for telling me to come here.

‐ [laughing] It wasn't me. It was you.

AUSTIN: I hate you. I hate you.

♪ ♪

People were freaking out.

No one had their room.

No one knew where their bags were.

SETH: There were just lines forming

in front of the blue house, so we got in line.

NICK: So I went out there with my laptop.

There was a line of, like, 600 people in front of me.

And I just, one by one, just started plugging away.

You know, tent by tent, tent by tent.

And we started‐‐we had a system going.

We got through maybe 400 people,

but then Billy stood up on that table

and he decided to undo everything that I had done.

SETH: And he kind of just said, "Go find a tent."

[overlapping chatter]

FELIX: And everyone's just running.

NICK: It was just this mad dash to claim your tent.

MAN: Shit.

AUSTIN: It was definitely a state of panic.

MAN: They're just telling everyone it's a free‐for‐all,

to just find an empty tent and grab it,

so this whole place is pretty fucked.

‐ Things could go terribly, terribly wrong at this point.

‐ It's about to be pitch black out here.

‐ People are panicking. ‐ People are panicking.

Like, tripping out. ‐ Okay.

‐ We have 250 houses rented for millions of dollars

with paper receipts and pictures of every house.

MAN: Why didn't your guests get to those houses

that you rented?

♪ ♪

‐ We had a box of physical keys,

cars to take people there,

and maps for every single house,

and the box of keys‐‐ unfortunately, it went missing.

MAN: You lost a box of keys to two‐million dollars' worth

of houses? ‐ Mm‐hmm.

MAN: So why didn't you tell that to the guests?

[awkward music]

♪ ♪

DAVE: After Blink 182 dropped out,

a lot of the bands just never got on the plane

because they could sense it was a smoldering heap.

AUSTIN: This is, like, five or six hours later,

we still don't have our luggage.

‐ What the fuck are we gonna do?

SETH: And that's when we ended up at that shipping container

where they were throwing luggage out,

like the white‐glove concierge service that they promised.

AUSTIN: There was absolutely zero organization.

NICK: People had to literally fight through

and try to find their bags.

That is the worst thing you could have possibly done.

AUSTIN: People are carrying mattresses.

SETH: So I tweet out, "Look at this.

"Do you see these lockers?

"Do you see the luxury food court?

Do you see this luxury cheese sandwich?"

CALVIN: At the same time,

Billy's lawyers were issuing cease and desist orders

to anyone that's actively posting negative comments.

BEN: They were threatening, "We're gonna sue you."

It wasn't just rich kids trapped on an island to me.

At that point, it was also a health concern

that there were people literally trapped on an island.

AUSTIN: This shit is a fucking disaster.

My immediate reaction was, "We need to get out of here."

Like, #RescueMission,

um...

♪ ♪

AVA: There was just, like, a run on the airports.

It was incredibly nightmarish

because they had to deal with persons

who were high out of your mind.

Very rowdy... ‐ 145! Whoo!

ALL: ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

SETH: They had been drinking all day.

There was a guy putting baby oil

on his completely sunburned body

just hammered at, like, 11:30 at night,

and we're just sitting there like,

"When do we get off this island?"

‐ Mind you, at this point, everyone's starting

to get antsy, grumpy, hungry, thirsty.

SETH: One guy passed out,

and they had to take him to the hospital.

AUSTIN: People were starting to yell and scream.

They brought, like, police from the island

into the room to calm people down.

MAN: When do we get our money back?

AUSTIN: Finally, we hear a plane is actually coming.

‐ We made it! ‐ We made it!

SETH: We get on the plane

and the pilot does the headcount,

and it doesn't match up with the manifest.

‐ We need to pay attention. He's gonna be calling names.

AUSTIN: The U. S. wouldn't let us come back

because we had 111 names and 112 people on the flight.

SETH: So he's making everybody wake up

and get off the plane.

‐ We are officially off the plane.

[bossa nova music]

♪ ♪

So far, heading to be the worst 24 hours of my life.

SETH: We get back on the plane.

‐ 4:51 a. m., still sitting here.

SETH: And then the pilot comes back.

‐ Ladies and gentlemen, I got some bad news.

SETH: Due to FAA regulations, that crew has to leave.

They've been on for too long. MAN: Let us go home.

AUSTIN: We go back into the waiting room.

SETH: And they lock the doors.

‐ We couldn't have anyone going out of the air side,

light up a cigarette, a fuel truck explodes.

Then we have a bigger issue.

STEWARD: Please take your seat and fasten your seatbelts.

[cheers and applause]

[engine roars]

SETH: On the plane, I got an email that said,

"We got off to a rough start on day one.

But day two's gonna be, you know, awesome."

‐ Crazy.

JAKE: And then things just blew up.

‐ Nightmare in paradise. There was no music.

REPORTER: They were put into disaster relief tents.

REPORTER: Slice of cheese on bread.

‐ For 48 hours, it was the number one trending story

on the news.

JIA: The media loves to write about millennials

that are really rich, really white, spoiled,

so when you have all of them stuck on an island

having a shit fit,

people were gleeful.

‐ Other events that Kendall Jenner has been promoting:

the Mount Etna Active Volcano Rave.

JIA: You know, this, like, tsunami of schadenfreude.

REPORTER: Some people are calling it

rich people's problems.

JIA: It's like, "Inject it directly into my veins.

"I want nothing but this

until the supply runs dry."

CONAN: What do you think of the Fyre Festival?

DAVE MATTHEWS: One of the greatest things

that's ever happened. I mean, it's terrible.

I mean, I know it's terrible.

WOMAN: We had no electricity. There was no showers.

There was no bathrooms. There's no, like,

running water.

‐ Man, white people love camping unless it's a surprise.

[laughter]

‐ Our firm started getting messages

from people who were there.

Images, screengrabs, audio, video.

And it invoked these images of "The Hunger Games"

or "Lord of the Flies."

‐ Release the monster!

‐ And it was like, you know, "Holy shit. This is serious."

I called all the associates into the office.

I said, "We're drafting a complaint."

And we actually filed on a Sunday night.

REPORTER: The failed Fyre Festival has been hit

with a $100 million lawsuit.

BEN: We asserted $100 million damages,

which is a large number.

It was my view that he should basically pay back

everything that the company could've been worth

to his victims.

CALVIN: While the Fyre Festival was gone,

Billy still had the Fyre app,

which was a talent‐booking app, and, you know,

a number of employees that were still working on it.

And there was this letter where the employees

of the Fyre app were seeking to separate themselves

from the festival.

‐ The first demand they made was that Billy fire Grant.

"Grant was abusive," they were saying.

You know, "Grant caused a lot of these problems."

CALVIN: And then someone had recorded this internal call

between Billy and the Fyre app employees

and then posted it on Soundcloud.

CALVIN: Billy was still representing

that this Comcast investment,

which I had effectively killed,

was still going to be coming in.

DAVE: They started expressing shock

that the Comcast investment never really happened.

MAN: You told several employees that "there was a $20 million

investment. We're gonna be fine."

‐ I can't comment on that.

CALVIN: Not only had he successfully conned

ticket holders, but he had also successfully conned employees.

And instead of trying to figure out how to make it right,

Billy decides that he's now a movie producer.

♪ ♪

MICHAEL: I get a call, and it's Billy McFarland.

I picked up just with, like, a "hey, how's it going?"

Billy wanted to do this "recovery documentary."

That's what he was calling it. It sounded like a PR exercise.

He says, "Where are you? Could you be here tonight?"

And he Venmos me $1,000 on the spot to buy a flight.

♪ ♪

So I get to his penthouse and the elevator opens up.

[shower running]

And about 45 minutes goes by, and he's still in the shower.

[laughs]

[shower running]

♪ ♪

That...was interesting.

He was living in this posh, clean penthouse,

removed from it all by many layers of glass,

and he wanted to get to the Bahamas

to try and recoup money for investors.

As we're on our way to land,

the entire government switches over

and comes out with a statement pretty much barring Billy

and the Fyre Festival for the rest of eternity.

Yeah.

[tense music]

‐ Uh, Delroy was gonna help us get all of our merchandise‐‐

all of our T‐shirts and sweatshirts and hats

out of Great Exuma,

but the customs has them all locked down.

‐ They didn't pay their customs duties,

so the Fyre Festival's merchandise was seized.

‐ Robbing customs was on the bullet list

of things that they were planning to do.

I was just curious to see how they were even gonna

possibly trick themselves into thinking

they could pull that off.

MAN: You say that Billy tried to get you to rob customs.

‐ Yeah, he tried.

BILLY: Did he pay you anything for stealing the merch?

‐ Me ain't never stole any merch.

[laughs]

JIMMY: Fyre Music Festival. Did you hear about this mu‐‐

in the Bahamas? [laughing] It was a disaster.

It was a big disaster. The bands didn't show up.

Nothing was ready.

Now the organizers are being sued

for $100 million. [crowd gasps]

When asked how they're gonna raise the money,

they said, "How about a musical festival?"

[laughter]

MICHAEL: I wish it was a joke, but after the Bahamas,

we went to Los Angeles. Ja Rule was there.

Billy was there.

MICHAEL: We're talking just a month after the disaster,

Fyre Festival 2018 was the goal.

CALVIN: When the thing went belly up,

Ja Rule took absolutely no accountability.

That's amazing to me.

But even though Ja Rule wasn't sweating any repercussions,

Billy was gonna have to deal with the FBI.

REPORTER: William McFarland, who created and founded

Fyre Festival with rapper Ja Rule,

arrested and charged with wire fraud

by the FBI, Friday.

‐ The legal situation does not involve any aspects

of the execution of the festival.

BILLY: So financial dealings have nothing to do

with the execution of the festival?

‐ Any payments made to vendors, team members,

are not in question in terms of any legal proceedings, no.

[dark music]

♪ ♪

JAKE: I'm looking right now at all of the details

that they're laid out in their case against him.

"McFarland's fraud was a deliberate plan

to deceive, motivated by unadulterated greed."

OVERLAPPING VOICES: "Whenever he needed more money,

he lied to investors." "Lack of remorse."

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "He did not feel

that what he was doing was wrong."

JAKE: "Throughout this scheme, McFarland causes losses

"to at least 80 victim‐investors

totaling more than $24 million."

‐ We didn't break the law in the execution of the festival.

MAN: What were you indicted for?

‐ Uh, I'm not gonna comment on any criminal‐‐

ongoing criminal proceedings. MAN: But you were indicted.

‐ I'm not‐‐I cannot comment on any ongoing

criminal proceedings. MAN: But there are

ongoing criminal proceedings? ‐ [stammers]

I can't comment on this.

BEN: He can come on he didn't do it,

but he's signing documents that say he did it.

And ultimately, you had a guilty plea.

♪ ♪

MAN: Has anyone ever called you a compulsive liar?

‐ I've been called a lot of things since the festival.

MAN: So you don't believe you have a compulsion

to augment the truth?

‐ It's like you're calling me all these crazy things, man.

Like, show me one thing that I said that's not true.

MAN: So you're not a liar? ‐ Show me one thing I said

that's not true today. I'm ready.

I'll sit here and wait.

MAN: Okay. Magnises.

‐ We had over 10,000 paying customers.

‐ We have 100,000 customers around the globe.

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: According to former Magnises employees,

Magnises never had more than 4,000 to 5,000 members.

‐ We spent $30 million to execute this festival.

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: But that was not true.

‐ We had 250 houses rented. COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Not true.

‐ I spent $5.9 million of my own money.

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Not true. He lied to investors.

Defrauded. Repeated misrepresentations.

Deliberate plan to deceive.

Fictitious and forged documents.

A sham. Betrayed and deceived

his investors, customers, and employees.

♪ ♪

‐ Okay, I'm gonna take a ten‐minute break

and I'll come back and we'll continue.

MAN: Uh, what's the ten‐minute break for?

To come up with that, or... ‐ No, I'm taking

a personal break. MAN: Okay.

MARIA: I would not trust a single word

that Billy says about his own motivations

or about himself

simply because Billy McFarland is a con artist.

I know all about them.

You know, I've researched them. I know they ruin lives.

They look into your soul, they see what you're missing,

and they take advantage of that.

The most surprising thing about con artists

is just how normal and likable they are.

For a con artist, deception is a constant practice.

A con artist would pass a lie detector test

with flying colors because there's no tension there.

To them, this is the truth.

They aren't delusional.

They're doing it very deliberately.

Billy has been running small cons his entire life.

♪ ♪

We're gonna be hearing from him again.

All con artists end up going back to conning.

♪ ♪

ANASTASIA: When me and Billy met,

it was destiny for us, I guess.

It's like, it's love. I don't know how to explain it.

Babe, what are you doing here?

‐ We're going on a little ride. Come on. Get in.

‐ I never had this kind of connection,

but he drew my attention just with his energy.

MARIA: Con artists like Billy are really personable.

They're fun and have just extraordinary charm.

‐ But then I Googled him.

That's when I realized that he was connected to Fyre Festival.

My mind, maybe my head, was saying one thing,

but then I had these feelings in my heart.

MARIA: These are people who get people to trust them,

and they have an explanation for everything.

ANASTASIA: He kind of explained me that, you know,

at some point, I guess he lost the sense of reality.

REPORTER: The biggest event in decades.

REPORTER: Tech mogul, Billy McFarland.

REPORTER: The next Zuckerberg.

[overlapping voices]

‐ [exhales, laughs] Sorry.

I think I'm shaking a little, and that's getting...

[laughs]

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

CALVIN: After the festival, Billy was out on bail

and still living a larger‐than‐life lifestyle.

I remember walking past Billy,

and one of my friends was with him.

I said, "What are you doing?"

He's like, "I don't know. Billy's got a table up at PH‐D.

And I'm thinking, like, "Wait a minute."

You got this guy

that's still out buying bottles in nightclubs in Manhattan,

and he had his girlfriend pay cash

to rent a Hamptons house.

They're hanging out in Amagansett together.

How is he affording to do this?

♪ ♪

SETH: Around the middle of December of 2017,

I got an email from NYC VIP Access.

It was a guy named Frank Tribble

offering Masters tickets.

My friends who had attended Fyre Festival

got the same email, and I kept getting them.

I got the Victoria's Secret, the Met Gala, Burning Man.

CALVIN: You can't buy tickets to the Met Gala.

I'd try.

You can't buy tickets to Victoria's Secret fashion show.

I've really tried that.

These are things that don't exist.

POLLY: If you've never been out on bail before,

that's the time in your life

where you wanna be committing the least number crimes.

SETH: I assumed Billy had sold this email list.

Like, I didn't actually think Billy was behind the scenes,

doing any of this.

So he was?

‐ [laughing]

[both laughing]

You cannot make this up.

‐ As it turns out, NYC VIP was Billy.

JAKE: He's out on bail for fraud and then he comes up

with another company to defraud people.

This is really a return to Billy's roots

when he built Magnises‐‐ it's promise people

exclusive access to events, and here he is doing it again.

BEN: He's like a gambler or an alcoholic,

where somebody keeps going back to that negative behavior.

He keeps going back to scamming people

like it's injected in his DNA.

JIA: In the millennial era, scamming is the air we breathe.

BEN: There is, essentially, a Fyre Festival going on

every day in the West Wing.

‐ It's basically the Fyre Festival of budgets.

JIA: One of the safest ways of making money in America

is to get really good at exploiting people

and to treat everyone like a mark.

You've got Anna Delvey, the so‐called Soho Grifter

and Elizabeth Holmes,

the CEO and founder of Theranos.

And then you have Billy McFarland,

and all three of them coasted for a really long time.

‐ I think Billy truly believed that he'd get away with it.

POLLY: But the rules still exist,

and he ended up facing three more charges

for wire fraud, bank fraud,

and giving false statements to a law enforcement officer.

♪ ♪

MAN: What does going to prison look like for you?

♪ ♪

‐ I don't know.

I haven't really gotten there yet.

♪ ♪

BEN: Billy had his bail revoked, and he was sent

to jail to basically start his prison sentence.

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "The United States of America

versus William McFarland, defendant."

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "It is my conclusion

"that the defendant is a serial fraudster

"and that to‐date, his fraud, like a circle,

"has no end.

"Your choices, and yours alone,

"are the reasons for your sentence,

"which is six years in custody.

"There is an agreed‐upon forfeiture

of $26,191,306.28."

JAKE: Billy has defrauded people. He's harmed people.

People have really suffered.

But is six years in prison

actually enough for what he's done?

‐ Um...

everyone.

[The Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup"]

CALVIN: We're living in an era in which

you can convince millions of people to do anything

just on marketing alone.

But in its wake, it leaves real harm.

‐ ♪ Let me down ♪ DIALLO: They skated out

of town and left everybody high and dry.

Can I curse on here? MAN: Yeah, go ahead.

‐ He's a fuck‐shot. He's a fuck‐shot.

It was a scam from the beginning.

‐ ♪ I need you, I need you ♪

BEN: Don't just focus on Billy. There are people who helped

Billy commit fraud so that they could make their money.

MAN: Yeah, that's Billy and Grant,

our new EMTs.

EMILY: I heard that Grant is now an EMT.

His favorite word was "urgent."

I had all‐caps "urgent" in my subject lines

all the time, so now he actually has urgent situations.

CALVIN: I have very deep concerns

around the marketing companies‐‐

anyone who kept promoting this up until the very end.

COMPUTERIZED VOICE: "All actions taken by Jerry Media

were done at the direction of the Fyre Festival."

"Like the ticket holders," "we were also misled."

"Per our previous correspondence,

Oren Aks has misrepresented himself."

‐ Okay. [chuckles] Well, fuck you guys.

[air horn blares]

OREN: I honestly can't believe

this documentary‐‐ there's two of them.

BEN: You kind of hope they do the right thing.

You can hope all you want.

More frequently, you have to sue.

‐ Motherfuckin' Ja Rule's in the building!

JAKE: So Ja Rule decides to go

on this show called "Drink Champs."

There's not a better place to brag about your crimes

than a show where a bunch of guys get drunk.

‐ People didn't really know I had anything to do

with the festival until... MAN: Until it went wrong.

That's the crazy part. ‐ Until it went wrong.

"Ja Rule's Festival!" MAN: And then they‐‐yeah.

They're trying to blame somebody.

[laughter] ‐ ♪ Ooh ♪

CALVIN: By the end of it, he's like,

"Yeah, it was my vision the whole time."

‐ It was my idea, my vision, to do this.

‐ This whole thing is‐‐ is an incredible story

because now he's out trying to do it all again

with Iconn, which is just a re‐branded Fyre app.

JIA: It's just an app where you can book rich people

to, you know, play your birthday party or whatever.

‐ It's very different, but it‐‐it's similar.

‐ ♪ I need you ♪

ANASTASIA: Jail sucks. Don't go to jail.

He says in the letter, like, uh...

[laughing] "I took a shower in the sink."

It's also, like, "Billy loves Anastasia."

Like, the drawings. You see?

JAKE: Billy is now teaching a class

on music entrepreneurship to fellow inmates.

In a certain sense, I mean, I guess you have to admire

the hustle.

‐ This is him calling. Can I answer really quick?

OPERATOR: This call is from... BILLY: William McFarland.

‐ Hey, babe. ‐ ♪ Ooh ♪

BEN: It's a great time to be a con man in America.

‐ ♪ Why do you build me up ♪ ‐ ♪ Build me up ♪

‐ ♪ Buttercup, ba... ♪ [music dies]