Dumpster Fire Phoenix: The “Festival” Organizer Who Just Can’t Stop Himself

Summary

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Chameleon (Audiochuck x Campside Media)

Episode: Dumpster Fire Phoenix: The “Festival” Organizer Who Just Can’t Stop Himself

Host: Josh Dean | Guest: Gabrielle Bluestone

Date: May 21, 2026

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Overview

This episode of Chameleon explores the enduring saga of Billy McFarland, infamous for orchestrating the Fyre Festival—an event that became the epitome of influencer-era scam culture. Host Josh Dean is joined by journalist and Fyre Festival documentarian Gabrielle Bluestone. Together, they dissect how McFarland engineered multiple high-profile frauds and how, even after criminal convictions and massive public humiliation, he keeps resurfacing with new ventures, seemingly impervious to failure or shame. The episode interrogates whether McFarland is a criminal mastermind or simply a product of a startup culture that prizes projection over substance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Golden Age of Deception (02:34–03:41)

• Podcast theme: Modern scams and fraudsters, with McFarland and Fyre Festival as emblematic.
• Josh Dean contextualizes Fyre Festival as a “meme scam” for the social media era, linking it to schemes like those of Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes.

2. The Birth and Hype of Fyre Festival (03:41–07:01)

• Social Media Blitz:
  • Influencer-driven mystery—promotional orange tiles by Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and others generated intense FOMO (04:03).

    “I started seeing people that I knew personally posting about it and I started to feel what I would later identify as like severe fomo.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [04:03]

  • Marketing versus reality: Luxe lies sold with next to no substance.

    “It looked like it was a project from a high school coding class and it really just did not make any sense.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [05:34]

• Media buy-in:
  • Major outlets hyped the festival, amplifying the illusion (06:24).

3. Detecting the Sham (05:30–07:17)

• Gabrielle Bluestone’s ‘Spidey Sense’:
  • Early skepticism at gap between image and infrastructure (06:04).
  • “Cassandra complex”: She was one of the few raising alarms before disaster struck.

4. The Collapse, as Seen Online (09:15–16:47)

• Warning signs abound:
  • No venue, no flights, no accommodation—timeline was “kind of horrifying” (09:25).
• Festival Weekend Disaster:
  • Attendees plied with Casamigos and rosé, then stranded in scenes reminiscent of Lord of the Flies (11:16–13:57).

    “So it turned into like a free for all rush into these tents because there were no cars, there were no ways to get to the airport, There were no flights out. … Lord of the Flies is really the best way to describe it.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [13:35]

  • The Cheese Sandwich Heard Around the World: The viral photo symbolized the chasm between the festival’s promises vs. reality (11:38).

    “They arrived and it was a styrofoam container with the saddest looking cheese sandwich... that image was such a perfect distillation that it just went so viral.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [12:17]

• Chaos and schadenfreude:
  • Social media documented every mishap, to the glee of the public.
  • “The only thing that stopped people from filming more was that there was no electricity.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [16:33]

5. The Aftermath and Reckoning (17:14–24:20)

• Billy McFarland’s Reaction:
  • Offered two tickets to “next year” instead of refunds (17:18).
  • Multiple documentaries followed, cementing Fyre’s place in the zeitgeist (18:03).
• Arrest & Prosecution:
  • Charged primarily with defrauding investors, not ticket buyers (20:29).
  • $26 million in losses, personal enrichment, and a “serial fraudster” label from the judge.

    “He was only ever charged with crimes really related to lying to investors… which I think says a lot about what our justice system considers important.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [20:29]

• Debate: Was this planned fraud or self-delusion? (20:53–23:39)
  • “He was in so deep that the only way out for him was through.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [21:22]
  • Fyre’s “real” festival was the influencer promo shoot, not the promised event (22:23–22:39).

6. Venture Repetition & Startup Culture Critique (27:00–32:52)

• Pattern recognition:
  • Billy’s “love of the game”—keeps scamming, even while on bail (27:20).

    “This is a man who was out on bail for the Fyre Festival crimes and launched a second scheme to fleece the same people…” – Gabrielle Bluestone [27:20]

• Startup culture’s dark side:
  • Critical discussion of how founders are rewarded for selling the impossible and rarely penalized for failure (29:54).

    “As a founder, you go into it knowing that if you fall on your face, there’s really no consequence.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [29:54]

7. Post-Prison Life & Serial Scheming (32:52–37:21)

• Billy’s New Hustles:
  • Podcasts from prison, failed COVID early-release attempt, moves back to NYC (32:52).
  • Re-offends by taking investment and not delivering.
  • Launches new startups (e.g., Pirate/PYRT), again using “festival” hype.
• Continued Media Attention:
  • Even gets a sympathetic spotlight on major networks.
  • Attempts to frame himself as a misunderstood tech visionary (36:47).

8. Fyre Festival 2 & the Meme-ification of Scams (37:21–41:29)

• Fyre Festival 2 Announcement:
  • Predictably postponed, then “sold” as a brand asset—acquired by LimeWire (now an NFT platform) for $245K (39:41–41:19).

    “What could possibly go wrong?” – Limewire statement [40:25]

• Parody and Pop Culture:
  • Even Ryan Reynolds gets involved, leveraging the Fyre saga for a Visa ad (40:25).

9. Phoenix: Billy’s Next Act—and the Replication Loop (41:40–44:34)

• Launched ‘Phoenix’ Festival:
  • Actually happened, acts performed, but was sparsely attended—“success” depends on your definition (41:51).
• Attempted Margarita Island festival:
  • Planned a risky, live-stream jet ski voyage (43:06–43:47). Did not occur as of airing.
• Public appeals for funding:
  • Billy positions himself as a misunderstood founder seeking one last shot.

10. Larger Reflections & The “Flat Circle” of Grift (44:34–45:49)

• Judicial pessimism about Billy’s future:

  • “I have no doubt he will be on to his next scam.” – Judge Buchwald (44:34)

• Gabrielle on the cult of conmen:
  • “There’s always going to be somebody willing to invest with Billy McFarland, which is just an incredible, incredible fact.” – [44:54]
  • Even inside players maintain connections, eager to be part of the next myth.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I started to feel what I would later identify as like severe fomo.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [04:03]
• “It looked like it was a project from a high school coding class…they had no assets, they had no physical manifestation of the things they were promising.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [05:34]
• “Lord of the Flies is really the best way to describe it.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [13:35]
• “His fraud like a circle has no end.” – Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald [29:35]
• “It’s a fraudulent industry if you really think about what’s prioritized and how successes are judged.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [31:09]
• “Fyre Festival 2 is real.” – Billy McFarland [38:18]
• “Now that I finally got it right, I’m launching the platform designed to power every single view online. This time, the fire doesn’t burn out. It burns everything down and builds something new.” – Billy McFarland [39:42]
• “There’s always going to be somebody willing to invest with Billy McFarland, which is just an incredible, incredible fact.” – Gabrielle Bluestone [44:54]

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Essential Timestamps

• 03:41 – Fyre Festival social media campaign launches, FOMO begins
• 07:17 – Josh Dean introduces the episode’s focus: Billy McFarland & Fyre Festival fallout
• 09:15–16:47 – Step-by-step unraveling of the Fyre Festival fiasco as it happens
• 11:38 – Viral “cheese sandwich” moment & Twitter amplification
• 20:29 – McFarland arrested, prosecuted; reflections on what justice the courts value
• 27:20–29:54 – Billy keeps scamming, startup culture’s role in enabling grift
• 32:52–37:21 – Podcasting from prison, new “ventures,” emergence from jail
• 37:21–39:41 – Fyre Festival 2, meme status solidified, sells brand to LimeWire
• 41:40–44:34 – Phoenix festival: actual music, minimal disaster but scant success
• 44:54 – Gabrielle’s reflection on the “eternal return” of McFarland-style frauds

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Tone & Language

• Wry, skeptical, incredulous: The hosts and guests discuss events with both awe and exasperation.
• Conversational, insightful: Both Josh Dean and Gabrielle Bluestone speak candidly and with journalistic rigor, mixing dry humor and hard-nosed analysis.
• Pop-culture savvy: Frequent references to memes, documentaries, influencer culture, startup cliches.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This episode provides a thorough/humorous yet scathing deep-dive into the Fyre Festival disaster and its architect Billy McFarland, charting his serial frauds and the media’s love-hate fascination. It uncovers how the incentives and image-worship of the influencer and startup economy create an environment in which grand cons flourish—and why even catastrophic failure didn’t deter McFarland from mounting endless comebacks.

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Chameleon continues to explore not just the details behind famous scams but the cultural and psychological conditions that enable them, making this episode essential listening for anyone interested in modern deception—and those who can never look away from a good “dumpster fire.”

Transcript

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[Gabrielle Bluestone]

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[Chameleon Podcast Host]

What is.

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[Chameleon Podcast Host]

Oh, it's just Chameleon Chameleon Chameleon Weekly

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

There are a handful of scams from the past decade that really made their mark on the zeitgeist that I randomly just think about sometimes. Fire Festival is definitely one of them. Billed as a sort of ultra exclusive Coachella in Paradise, it was the brainchild of a 25 year old New Jersey kid named Billy McFarlane. Billy claimed to have started his first business in grade school and then dropped out of college during his freshman year to become a tech entrepreneur. He was on his third very tenuous startup in 2017 when he partnered with a rapper, Ja Rule, to announce the so called Fyre Festival as a way to promote their new music booking app, also called Fire, in both cases spelled with a Y in place of an I. An awareness of this Fyre Festival just exploded on social media one day in the spring of 2017. That's how a vice reporter named Gabrielle Bluestone found out about came to me,

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

I think the same way that it came to everyone else that found out about Fire, which was through this incredible social media marketing campaign that they had launched that seemed to involve every famous influencer and actress and musician that you'd ever heard of.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

People like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

One day they were all just posting this like ambiguous orange tile on Instagram. I started seeing people that I knew personally posting about it and I started to feel what I would later identify as like severe fomo.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Billy and Jah had apparently found the site, a private island once owned by an associate of Pablo Escobar, while flying around the Bahamas on a private plane. They later returned with some models, including a few of the aforementioned influencers, and captured immaculate footage of beautiful people frolicking in the crystal blue waters for use in a 1 minute 41 second video that announced the festival. 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.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

It purported to be promising regular people access to this lifestyle that previously you had only seen on social media. And they did such a good job at marketing this private island. Private Jet lifestyle. Part of it that you didn't really notice that, like this is a music festival and the headliner is Blink 182. It wasn't sonically that progressive or cool of a festival, but because they had celebrities, you know, the most wealthy, beautiful women in the world saying, come, join us, it really looked like it was going to be something groundbreaking.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

It seemed incredible. Gabrielle wanted to know more.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

What I found was when I got off of Instagram and onto their actual website, that there was this really big gap between this luxury experience that they were marketing and then what this company actually looked like. I joke that it looked like it was a project from a high school coding class and it really just did not make any sense. When they're selling million dollar yach ticket packages with no photos, they had no assets, they had no physical manifestation of the things they were promising.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

She could just tell that something was off.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

It was really the first time in my life that I had, I call it kind of like a spidey sense. There was something very off and wrong here and I knew that I had the tools to figure it out.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Trouble was, no one seemed to care, not even her editors. At first, it was just too fabulous. Around the interwebs, revered brands bought in,

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

the Daily Mail picked it up and people picked it up and Vogue picked it up and without the festival having to say a word, all of a sudden all these legacy media outlets are saying, like, look at this thing, you're going to want to get tickets. Keep an eye on this. And it's funny, a lot of them have since edited it, but you can still see it in the URL on some of these sites. The Internet never forgets. And it's so funny in retrospect because the people that bought tickets and the people that were used in the marketing of this festival were some of the most connected Internet savvy people on the planet. And nobody really looked much further than the marketing.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

That was a mistake.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

It's a cliche, the Cassandra kind of figure in something like this. But nobody was listening. And it was all there for like anyone with like a little cynicism about it to find. And just, you know, it seemed like I was the only person looking.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

I'm Josh Dean and this is Chameleon, the show where things are rarely as they first seem. This week, the story of the infamous Fyre Festival and its opportunist creator, Billy McFarland. What was supposed to be the music event of the century turned out to be one of the first meme scams. Of the social media era. A dumpster fire that just wouldn't go out.

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[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

This is Chameleon the Weekly. In retrospect, there were plenty of signs, arguably even billboards.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

If you looked at the timeline, a lot of it didn't make sense, especially when you realize after the fact that they had no framework in place whatsoever. When they started announcing this stuff, they hadn't secured their location, they hadn't even figured out where people were going to sleep or go to the bathroom, and they had just a couple months to put all this stuff together. It was actually kind of horrifying when you look at how short the timeline really was. And it was like a self enforced error, like nobody, nobody made them pick this weekend. It didn't make a lot of sense.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Regardless, hundreds of tickets were sold, possibly even thousands. Real influencers were definitely making plans to go to the Bahamas. Then as the date approached, some of those influencers began to fret openly on their accounts about the fact that they had no plane tickets or confirmed accommodations

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

like wait, I was supposed to go to this festival. I don't know how I'm getting there. And in the last week or two, the noise grew very loud. It became more obvious that something was off.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

And yet influencers got influence. I mean, people were worried, but they still got on those planes. Hundreds of people. Exactly how many is still unclear. Did just that. They got on chartered planes, which at one point had been sold as private jets, but turned out to be regional budget jets. Some of them wrapped in FIRE branding and flew to Grand Exuma in the Bahamas. They were surprised to find a very small welcoming party, just a few people from FIRE who helped them to school bus shuttles that delivered them to a beach bar where complimentary Casamigos and Rose was served. Planes kept landing and guests kept being shuttled to that one bar where servers eventually got so overwhelmed that they just started handing out bottles. People got very drunk and then very worried because other than the beach bar, there didn't seem to be much of a plan.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

It was really on night zero when people realized, like, we don't have anywhere to sleep. Like, we're at this bar and there is no secondary location. And so it started playing out like in real time on social media the night before the festival was really supposed to start. And that's when the cheese sandwich heard around the world. That photo was posted and it really started going like mega viral.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Gabrielle is referring here to perhaps the most famous social media post of the fire fiasco. A photo of the world's saddest sandwich, white bread with cheese slices and some wilted lettuce, shared on Twitter by a guy named Trevor De Haas. His caption, the dinner that Fyre festival promised us was catered by Stephen Starr, is literally bread, cheese and salad with dressing.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

You know, it was the perfect encapsulation of what you ordered versus what arrived. They had promised that it was gonna be catered by stuff Stephen Starr, you know, Michelin standard dining.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Stephen Starr is an acclaimed Philadelphia restaurateur who operates numerous high end restaurants in both Philly and New York.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

And then they arrived and it was a styrofoam container with the saddest looking cheese sandwich you've ever seen in it. And that image was such a perfect distillation of what had happened that it just went so viral.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

To be fair, not everyone got soggy cheese sandwiches. Others got hot dogs. Some even got chicken and salad. The biggest problem by a mile was lodging. Some attendees had paid $10,000 or more for private villa rentals, and the majority had paid at least a few thousand for what had been marketed as glamping tents.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

And then as night started to fall, they loaded them on buses and brought them to the site. And there was no one to tell them where to go or to sort, you know, help people sort out where they were. I guess the only place they could really find was an undeveloped, like, kind of construction pit next to a Sandals resort.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

An undeveloped construction pit with a very limited number of not glamping tents.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

There were tents, the tents that FEMA uses for disaster relief. They had managed to secure those. There were some soggy mattresses for the people that did make it. That's pretty much it.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

There wasn't even a system for assigning the tents that were available. Just one guy with a laptop who couldn't handle the drunken horde and eventually just ran off.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

So it turned into like a free for all rush into these tents because there were no cars, there were no ways to get to the airport, There were no flights out. People were stuck in this chaos and it was like, hunker down, Find a place to sleep for the night. It was a really dismal, you know, Lord of the Flies is really the best way to describe it.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Gabrielle is not kidding. One Reddit AMA hosted by a guy who actually went to Fyre Fest described it like as voiced by an actor.

[Reddit AMA Participant]

Yep, we found a tent. The mattresses and bedding were all soaked. Most tents had the bedding and or mattresses pulled out. The difficult thing was keeping a tent. If one person didn't stay behind, your stuff was at risk of getting stolen or other people drunkenly take over your tent. If you come back to your tent and four people say, this is our tent, yo, what should you do?

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The alternative for those without tents, according to our Redditor, it was either that

[Reddit AMA Participant]

or the ground made of broken concrete rubble. The site was an abandoned housing development.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Another guest quoted in Vanity Fair said

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

it was just epic chaos.

[RealReal Advertiser]

Their plan was to get everyone really drunk and they'll forget how shitty this really is.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

And our master of ceremonies, Billy McFarlane.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

Billy was there to his credit. He was on the ground. He was trying to do damage control. He left pretty quickly and disappeared after that. He was spotted on a chartered yacht nearby. I don't think he returned to the festival site after that.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

What made this fiasco extra delicious for those back home was that it played out in real time on social media, Twitter especially. Guests live tweeted it all, sharing experiences and memes.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

It was incredible. The virality in real time and the absolute glee that people that weren't there were taking and watching this play out, you know, it looked like a Lord of the Flies situation, but explicitly for young, attractive, wealthy influencers.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

One of my favorite Twitter posts is an exchange under a photo from the site that one user shared. A reporter from Business Insider wrote, asking for permission to use the image. And the original poster replied, yes, you may, but please send help. They trapped us. Please. That last part was all caps at the same time.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

In a really perverse way, it was exactly what they're there for, right? It was this exclusive viral moment that they were providing the. The imagery and the commentary for. They got to really own that experience. You know, this is.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

I'm sorry, sort of nuts because people paid thousands of dollars here to sleep on wet mattresses if they were lucky. Food was limited. Water too. But also, Gabrielle is completely right. It's the world we now inhabit, where even the worst day of your life is content to be mined. At the end of the day, our currency is clicks.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

The only thing that stopped people from filming more was that there was no electricity. So if they hadn't pre charged or brought external chargers, eventually you kind of had to stop filming because you couldn't just plug in a.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The next morning, the few fireworkers who were still on site at least tried to help. They walked around with clipboards asking for names, passport numbers, and contact info. They were scrambling to arrange flights. Attendees crammed into cabs and begged for rides to the airport, where more lines awaited.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

The Bahamas got involved, and many of the return flights were able to take off the next day. So eventually everyone got out. Some people slept at the airport overnight.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Billy, when he did finally surface, had quite an offer.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He made the incredible. Like, truly the most incredible response, which was, you know, they apologized and then they said, everyone who had tickets for this year, we're going to give you two free tickets for next year. You know, you don't even need to get a refund because we're going to give you more when you come back next year. Like, they just. There was no shame. It was so brazen.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The Fyre Festival moment lingered in the cultural conversation for longer than you might expect. Certainly by today's terms, it was fodder for news and online chatter for weeks after. And ultimately, two different competing documentaries were made. One for Netflix, one for Hulu. The Netflix version was based in part on Gabrielle's reporting. She's an executive producer and was nominated for an Emmy for it.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

The two documentaries coming out at once is really what made it such a cultural moment. And I think People watched both as a result, so I can only be grateful that so many eyeballs were on it.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Billy did not participate in Gabrielle's version for Netflix, but he did talk to her shortly after the festival collapsed.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He was conciliatory, he was apologetic. And then I hung up and, you know, an hour later read the exact same thing in Rolling Stone. So he was making the same call over and over. And I assume, reading from a statement,

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

the two also spoke one more time.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

I interviewed him again a year later while he was pretending to be one of his own employees named Frank Tribble. He had hired this guy as kind of like a frontman to hide the fact that Billy was actually running this thing. And I called up Frank to kind of get a sense of what was going on and realized, like, wow, Frank's voice sounds really familiar. And realized kind of at the end of the call and after the fact that this was actually Billy.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

By this point, Billy was really feeling the heat. Most, if not all, of the Fyre Festival attendees did get their money refunded via credit card chargebacks. But the original investors who put up money for land and planes and infrastructure had lost millions, and that led ultimately to criminal charges.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

Federal agents are arresting William McFarland, creator of the Fyre Festival that turned into a fiasco this morning.

[News Reporter]

The man behind the Fyre Festival, in his own legal hot water, William McFarlane. McFarlane, who created and founded the event with rapper Ja Rule, arrested and charged with wire fraud by the FBI Friday. At the time, McFarlane blaming a storm for the epic festival fail. Federal prosecutors saying in a statement that he allegedly presented fake documents to induce investors to put over a million dollars into his company and the fiasco called the Fyre Festival. McFarlane could be sentenced to up to 20 years in 20 prison if convicted.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The feds alleged that McFarland lied about his company's liquidity and relationships to approximately 80 investors who dumped at least 26 million into fire. According to a U.S. attorney, McFarlane had put 13 million into his private accounts to pay for his, quote, extravagant lifestyle, which included a $21,000 per month penthouse in Manhattan. Numerous civil suits also sprung up, including a class action from people who'd bought tickets and attended the festival.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

I've always found it interesting and telling that he was only ever charged with crimes really related to lying to investors. You know, what he did to the public and the danger that he put people in and the fraud that he perpetuated on ticket buyers was never really addressed or an issue which I think says a lot about what our justice system considers important, especially in these financial crimes.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

One of the things I've always wondered about Fire was whether it actually was a fraud from the outset. Was Billy McFarlane a criminal mastermind who set out to create a fake festival in order to bilk money from investors and ultimately even ticket buyers? Or did he just bite off more than he could chew because there was an island, There were flights and some tents? Billy did go to the site with employees. Is it possible he just believed his own bullshit?

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

I'm just speculating here, but I think you get to a certain point and, like, you have to go through the motions, right? You have to show up, you have to try and plug those holes wherever you can, because you can't cancel it. He was in so deep that the only way out for him was through. If there was gonna be a way out. My best guess is that he thought if he could have enough of the elements in place. And I think there is a fair assumption that, like, you know, you know, cognitively, like, what you see on social media is not necessarily what you're gonna get on the ground.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

What she means, I think, is that the Coachella you see on Instagram is not the one most attendees experience. People may look hot in their flower crowns and crop tops, but they're also sleeping in cars and surviving on sun ships.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

So I think he thought that maybe if like, there were places for everyone to sleep and the bands performed, that he could maybe pull it off in the sense that, like, maybe he wouldn't go to jail for it.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Of course, there were no bands. The only one that ever played was some local act. Blink 182, Migos, Major Lazer. None of them showed up.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

The Real Fyre Festival, the one that he promised everyone they had already thrown when they brought all the models down to do the marketing campaign, the one

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

that resulted in that slick 1 minute, 41 second video with the private jets and jet skis and Emily Ratajkowski playing with wild pigs.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

And I think that that was the real motivator for this the whole time, which was how do we. These, like, schmucks from New Jersey who have never actually built anything. How do we live that private jet lifestyle? How do we have it so that we can call up these models and they'll fly with us anywhere we. And they realized that having a tech startup and a music festival was the way to get people to take those calls. And that investors were excited about that, apparently.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

So. Around 80 of them anyway.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

A lot of their investors were older men who wanted to be part of the zeitgeist.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

One guy Gabrielle talked to said that his industry, oil and gas, just wasn't sexy.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

The big question about fire, and I, I think it's still an open question with a lot of people is whether they knew or should have known. And I think reporting shows that there were a lot of really big inflection points where an adult in the room should have said, like, hey, this isn't going to happen. This is dangerous. We need to pull a plug.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

In fact, Gabrielle had heard from two whistleblowers in the buildup to the festival. A property owner who lived near the proposed site and someone closer to the business who was aware of just how woefully unprepared Billy was. So there were forces trying to warn

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

the world, but ultimately they couldn't because Billy lied about purchasing festival insurance. Like, there was no way that they could stop this train. I do think it's very clear that Billy was the driving force on this. So as far as, like, co conspirators or who else had, like, criminal knowledge, it's really impossible to say, but there were a lot of people who are professionals who either got swept up in it or didn't think it was worth, you know, speaking up. Who should have?

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

You might think that Billy McFarlane would have learned his lesson at this point, but that's not the case. We'll get into all that after the break.

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[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

You're listening to Chameleon, the Weekly. The main question about Billy McFarland in my mind is this. Was he smart enough at 25 to architect an elaborate fraud just to fund his own lifestyle? Or was this simply the case of a dorky starfucker who sold something he couldn't actually build?

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

I think that Billy does it for the love of the game. This is a man who was out on bail for the Fyre Festival crimes and launched a second scheme to fleece the same people he had stolen money from for the Fyre Festival, for which he was also criminally charged, and then told the judge that he did it because he was trying to raise money for reparations to the same victims.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

This is true. In June of 2018, while awaiting his sentencing on the original fraud charges, Billy was arrested and charged again for selling fraudulent tickets to exclusive events like the Victoria's Secret fashion show that he didn't actually have access to via a new venture he was calling NYC VIP Access. That's how Gabrielle had ended up talking to Frank Tribble the guy Billy was pretending to be on the phone to her that time because Billy had hired him to be the front for this new scam.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He got caught scamming the exact same pool of victims. And when I say the exact same pool, he had ported over the email list, like he was genuinely focusing on the exact same people and made the incredible claim that was to raise money to pay them back. And that's something, if you look through kind of his filings over the years, he's always claimed that all he wants to do is make things right, and that somehow justifies whatever scheme he's just been caught doing.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

It was certainly McFarlane's go to position for garnering sympathy in interviews like here with Michael Strahan of abc.

[Billy McFarland]

I was totally wrong, and I lied to investors to get money, but I put every dollar I had or could find to make this festival happen. And I literally came back to New York after with $100 in my pocket. So I need to apologize. And that is the first and last thing that needs to be done is I let people down.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

How do you expect people to trust you?

[Billy McFarland]

Time and just doing little things on a weekly basis and just slowly building. I went way too fast before, so I need to do everything now in a manageable way that I can actually make work.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

And then you realize that this is just an excuse for him doing the exact same thing all over again. This guy, it's a spiral to the end. I'll never forget the judge, when she was sentencing him, used the phrase, his fraud like a circle has no end.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

This was during his sentencing for the first set of charges for the $26 million fraud. And it's not all. Judge Naomi Reese Buchwald said the defendant is a serial fraudster. She told the court, Mr. McFarland is a fraudster and not simply a misguided young man. His bad intent was long standing, but

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

at the same time, it is also such an indictment of startup culture and kind of this, like, VC world that we live in now, where as a founder, you are expected to be a con artist, you are expected to sell an idea that you genuinely don't know if it's gonna work or not. But, like, you have to be confident about it, you know, move fast and break things. And that is expected. And it's expected that a lot of these businesses are going to fail. So as a founder, you go into it knowing that if you fall on your face, there's really no consequence.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Before fire, Billy McFarlane had a company called Magnesis that offered an exclusive invite only credit card with concierge services for millennials. It purported to be a younger, cooler version of the American Express black card, but it was really just a shiny piece of metal connected to its users other debit or credit cards. And before that there was Spling, a social media company Billy started after dropping out of college and supposedly sold.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He was able to market that as a win, even though they had never made any money and all the users of the site were actually friends of Billy that he had been paying to go on and click and make it seem as if there were any value to this.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

There's a recurring theme here, but one that isn't exclusive to Billy McFarlane's story.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

It's a fraudulent industry if you really think about what's prioritized and how successes are judged. I think that's why you see so many the pipeline of Forbes 30 under 30 to prison kind of thing. It's a much bigger issue with the culture and I think Billy was just really good at operating within it.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

After his sentencing in 2018, Billy was sent to Otisville, a minimum security prison in upstate New York.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

Not like a cushy setup, but a good setup for him until he got caught with a recording device.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

It was a USB recorder designed to look like a pen.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He claimed that it was to help him write a memoir. So after that he was put in solitary confinement and then he was transferred

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

to a more serious prison in Ohio,

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

where he then decided to launch a podcast from prison.

[Billy McFarland]

I'm currently serving my 29th month in federal prison at FCI Elkin in Ohio. This is my story.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

That podcast called Dumpster Fire was billed as the quote, uncensored complete story of Fyre Festival. They did seven episodes with Billy contributing his parts via prison phone calls.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

When the prison found out what he was doing, they also put him in solitary confinement.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

He also tried to get himself released early during COVID by claiming health issues.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He made all these claims that the government pretty handily refuted, leading Billy to withdraw his petition, which if you go and read the court filings around that the judge was like incredibly pissed that this was an issue that needed to be ruled on. And Billy essentially realized like he was not going to get away with it and pulled it.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

So he did not get early release, but he did get Covid. McFarlane was finally released from jail in 2022, having served less than four years of his six year sentence. He moved into a small apartment in New York and picked right back up posting about his exciting new ventures on Instagram.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

He was initially an income appropriate, I guess you would say, walk up apartment in Brooklyn. But he very quickly moved out of there and has been living kind of the penthouse lifestyle ever since.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

He began selling personal videos on Cameo as well as calendar appointments. Which doesn't exactly explain how he was paying for this return to fine living.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

Well, if you go by court filings, there's at least one, you know, investor who met him in prison who claims that Billy took, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of his that were earmarked for a company and used them for his own personal gain.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

That would be a guy named Jonathan Taylor who claims that Billy agreed to give him one third of a new startup called Pirate technologies for a $740,000 investment. But the Billy didn't give him the equity or refund his investment. Alas, this was just a speed bump on Billy's redemption tour. He appeared on Fox Business News with afternoon host and former MTV VJ Kennedy in December of 2022 promoting that flashy venture, Pirate, which is spelled for some reason, P Y R T. The man

[Kennedy (Fox Business Host)]

responsible for that debacle is now out of prison and launching a brand new business venture. Here to tell me all about the launch of Pirate.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Promotional materials described Pirate as a, quote, virtual, immersive, decentralized reality that would be launched with, I shit you not, a music festival on a private island in the Caribbean. But that's not really what Kennedy wanted to talk about.

[Kennedy (Fox Business Host)]

What were you thinking with Fyre Festival?

[Billy McFarland]

I was so stupid and so wrong and if I could have 30 seconds to tell you what I thought, what I thought is a keyword that I was trying to do.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Billy, to his credit, did have an answer, one he'd had five years to

[Billy McFarland]

shape for years before fire. I was taking customers from my previous business, Agnesis. Yeah, the Outer Islands of the Bahamas. These were an industry diverse group who had some pretense about them in New York. And we came to these Outer Islands and really connected over adventure. The bonds that were formed were just so incredible and I was just so driven to share what was happening with the world. And that led to the terrible idea of trying to invite a few thousand people. I wish I had a stash of cash somewhere I could send the money tomorrow, but I need to work and I need to make it happen.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The restitution, he means he still owes more than 25 million to investors and

[Billy McFarland]

like that is the most important thing.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Kennedy mentioned seeing Billy pop up in a doc about another notorious New York City based scammer, Anna Delvey, a Russian emigre who posed as a wealthy heiress to scam some members of the city's young elite. This made her think to draw some connections.

[Kennedy (Fox Business Host)]

There's a series of you and I

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

would include sbf, Sam Bankman, Fried, the

[Kennedy (Fox Business Host)]

crypto fraudster, and Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes. And you, like, you guys have these massive aspirations, but I don't know if you have the talent to meet the ambition. So you just sort of fudge everything else. Is that a fair assessment?

[Billy McFarland]

I think what went wrong with me is that I got away from what took me to fire and that was technology. I've been programming since I was 11 years old and it introduced me to this wild world of entertainment and I forgot where I came from.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

This was a new explanation and maybe the most honest one yet. That at heart, he's just a tech nerd. But having some early success and access to money gave him some exposure to the sexy, alluring glamour of the entertainment business. And then that was all he could see. He didn't want to do tech. He wanted to party with models.

[Billy McFarland]

I think a lot of people hope that I could crawl into a hole and essentially die, but I need to find pride. And that pride is going to be this lifelong journey of trying to make a positive impact and paying people back.

[Kennedy (Fox Business Host)]

You have made the point, you have served your time, you have paid your penance. Do you deserve to have a fresh start?

[Billy McFarland]

I think it all gets back to what I do in the next three, five, seven, ten years. Like, I'm lucky enough that I'm 30, so I hopefully have 30 more working years ahead of me. Yeah, let me go out and try. And I'd rather go out and try and try, honestly, than give up and not try to make things right.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

In August of 2023, Billy made an announcement on Instagram that felt, honestly, kind of inevitable.

[Billy McFarland (Social Media Announcement)]

What's up, guys? This is a big day because as

[Billy McFarland]

of right Now, Fyre Festival 2 tickets are officially on sale.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

That's right, Fyre Festival 2. This time in Mexico.

[Billy McFarland]

It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here. And it really all started during the seventh month stint in solitary confinement. I wrote out this 50 page plan of how it would take this overall interest and demand in fire and how it would take my ability to bring people from around the world together to make the impossible happen. In my first year, I partnered with one of the biggest and best TV

[Billy McFarland (Social Media Announcement)]

companies in the world to produce a

[Billy McFarland]

documentary called after the Fire. I've also worked with one of the biggest production companies to sign a deal to produce Fyre Festival, the Broadway musical. And finally, today, we are announcing Fyre Festival 2. Guys, this is your chance to get in. This is everything I've been working towards

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

on the slogan was Fyre Festival 2 is real. He even made a new trailer.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

Billy.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The infamous Fyre festival.

[Billy McFarland]

I owed $26 million in restitution. I'm a fugitive in the Bahamas. They came into my cell one day and said, only one of us is leaving here alive. There's obvious.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

The trailer plays out like a mini documentary. Over two minutes and way too many quick cuts. Painting our hero as both misunderstood and humbled.

[Billy McFarland]

Stripped literally nothing that I learned what truly matters. Everybody asks me this, like, do you think Billy has learned from his experience and all? There's basically two paths.

[Billy McFarland (Social Media Announcement)]

Billy McFarlane story.

[Billy McFarland]

I'm just fighting to survive. Last year, can't focus.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

It's his redemption story if he wants it to be. Fyre Festival 2 was scheduled to go down at the end of May 2025, and it did not happen. That April, a message was posted On Fire's website stating that Fyre Festival 2 is postponed and will be rescheduled for a later date in the future. That message was subsequently deleted and replaced with news that Fyre Festival 2 was in fact still on and that a new location would be announced soon. Instead, the next we heard from McFarlane, he had decided to put the brand itself, Fyre Festival, up for sale. He expected it to net millions. In the end. Someone paid $245,000, which is still about $240,000 more than I would have guessed.

[Billy McFarland]

Literally.

[Billy McFarland (Social Media Announcement)]

I just sold Fyre Festival and now I'm rising from the ashes. And if I do this right, I'm going to go way bigger. I want to own every single view on the Internet. I've been chasing one idea for my whole life. The idea that views drive economy views aren't just a driver of economy views are the entire economy views are the new currency. Now that I finally got it right, I'm launching the platform designed to power every single view online. This time, the fire doesn't burn out. It burns everything down and builds something new. The rise starts now. What happens when you sell your dream?

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

LimeWire, the file sharing service last heard from in the early aughts, which had rebranded as an NFT platform, won the auction. A joint statement announcing the release said. Big news. Fyre Festival has officially been acquired by Limewire. What could possibly go wrong? It went on fire, became a symbol of hype gone wrong. But it also made history, LimeWire CEO said. We're not bringing the festival back. We're bringing the brand and the meme back to life, this time with real experiences and without the cheese sandwiches. It turned out that Limewire had outbid Ryan Reynolds, who was bidding for his creative agency, Maximum Effort. Congrats to Limewire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest, reynolds said in a statement. I look forward to attending their first event, but will be bringing my own pallet of water instead. Reynolds pivoted and simply paid Limewire to use the name in a very clever Visa commercial.

[Billy McFarland]

You wanted to attend the music festival of the year. What you got was half a slice of cheese and a glass of freshly squeezed ocean.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

And if you think that's the last we'd hear of Billy McFarlane, well, you've clearly slept through most of today's episode. Just a few months later, he had arisen again from the ashes, like a

[Billy McFarland]

phoenix taking to social media, promising a once in a lifetime festival of music experiences and fun. Taking place this weekend on a small island off the coast of Honduras.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

This new venture of Billy's Phoenix, as he called it, was, according to its website, a platform built to own every view on the Internet. The Festival would be Phoenix's splashy launch, and on December 8, 2025, Billy McFarlane did indeed host a music festival on a tropical island. And this time there really was music. French Montana showed up and played. So did Bobby Shmurda, in front of a banner that read Gooch Island. Video taken on site revealed that the festival was modestly attended, but you could also stream it for seven bucks a pop. The magazine Consequent Sound reported that around 100 people were tuning in at its peak. In a story headlined Fyre Fest's Billy McFarlane actually put on a Music Festival. How successful it was depends on your definition of the word. The Onions AV Club celebrated the event with a headline that practically wrote itself Billy McFarlane pulls off music Festival without Stranding Hundreds in the Bahamas. After that, there was Christmas. And it wasn't even a month into 2026 when Billy McFarlane was back again with a new announcement. He planned to stage yet another concert, this time on Margarita island off Venezuela.

[Billy McFarland (Social Media Announcement)]

My life has been all about bringing people together in places they never considered but really should. Venezuela is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and I've always wanted to go. And this time, just like when I landed in Utila a few months ago, I'm not leaving until the Freedom Concert happens.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

And he would travel there by jet Ski.

[Billy McFarland (Social Media Announcement)]

The entire journey will be live streamed. If you want to risk it all, I'm inviting three people to Jet Ski with me. Or if you're a brand who wants a ton of exposure, you can put your logo on our Jet Skis and have it plaster on everybody's social media feed for 17 days. Safety is definitely not guaranteed. And this is the entire point.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

As of this writing in the spring of 2026, it still hasn't happened. Instead, never one to sit idly by, Billy McFarland pivoted yet again. And this move, I guess, was sort of inevitable.

[Billy McFarland]

I feel that I can accomplish my goals best, which is paying everybody back and also creating moments in the largest possible scale by owning and further developing the Fire ip. The challenge is that I'm not allowed to raise money and I'm not allowed to issue equity, but I can create campaigns, I can bring talent together, I can do festivals, and most importantly, I can create these moments that people can touch and feel and talk about and be entertained by through around the world. So if you're a brand and you want to be part of this moment of buying fire back, my DMs are open.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

I think of the judge who sentenced Billy to six years in prison back in 2018. The motivation here was greed, a desire to have a flashy lifestyle, she said, calling him a, quote, selfish and self absorbed character. The judge also predicted that were he to be released too soon, I have no doubt he will be on to his next scam.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

Like time is a flat circle. There's always going to be somebody willing to invest with Billy McFarlane, which is just an incredible, incredible fact. Even after everything. If you watch the Netflix documentary, there was a really viral moment in ours where Andy King, who had been working on the festival, he was a well established society guy who knows throwing parties. He throws great parties, but he was willing to give a customs official a blowjob to get their Evian water released. It was a wild moment. And even after all of that, you know, he still did promotions with Billy when Billy got out of prison. Like even people who were there, who saw it, who know what he's capable of, like are still rooting for him, still want to see redemption for him. It's incredible.

[Josh Dean (Chameleon Host)]

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media in Australia. Audio Chuck it's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Simonhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Theme by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadas, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help, and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at A special number we've set up, 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Gabrielle Bluestone]

I think Chuck would approve.

[Chameleon Podcast Host]

In the world of true crime, the real story isn't always in the headlines. It's in the evidence. I'm Brandi churchwell, host of 13Zero podcast, and I'm here to take you past the news cycle and straight into the courtroom. Every week, I'll break down the investigation, the prosecution, the defense, and everything that unfolds beyond the jury box. We'll examine every testimony, every exhibit, and every hidden motive. Listen to 13th Juror wherever you get your podcasts.