Fyre Festival Employees Talk About What Went Wrong
Spoiler alert: It’s basically everything.
Remember how happy the internet got when thousands of rich millennials who were going to an island in the Bahamas to get their dicks sucked and listen to Blink-182 ended up living like the refugees their parents won’t allow in the country instead?
I do.
However, what led to something so heavily promoted by social media influencers like Kendall Jenner being such a massive disaster? Well:
From Variety:
It was, said one production professional briefly associated with the festival, “incompetence on an almost inconceivable scale.”
Incredible.
While people were quick to blame the social media influencers who had nothing to actually do with the festival, and festival producer Ja Rule, it looks like a lot of it came down to Ja Rule’s business partner, 26-year-old Billy McFarland, who doesn’t know what the word ‘no’ means.
He claimed that the festival tanked because the staff were naive and overwhelmed, but according to the actual staff, it tanked because he fired them all when they told him they couldn’t meet his impossible demands.
“The infrastructure just wasn’t there,” the former staffer continued. “It had to be built. [Fyre] hired a bunch of professionals and the professionals told them it was impossible — and they couldn’t handle that, so they fired everyone. I think the statement they released is a slap in the face to the people on the island and the production company that did end up working with them. They just didn’t want to hear it.”
Even appealing to the egos of these people didn’t work. It takes at least eight months to build a festival of that scale. And McFarland wanted it done in less than half that time. When the people he hired tried appealing to his ego to get him to push it back, it didn’t even work.
“You’re going to destroy your brand if you try to have it on this date and don’t deliver what you promised. If you push the date a year, people will be upset. But once you deliver what you promised, they’ll get over it.’ But it was like they didn’t care: They literally kept saying, ‘We’re gonna be legends.’”
Incredible.
