Fyre Festival’s Pitch To Investors Is Exactly As Absurd As You Would Imagine
Are you still at a loss about Fyre Festival? Are you wondering how the would-be luxury Bahamian music festival actually got to the point of realization — how it became real-life Theater Of The Absurd for the age of the Instagram story? Vanity Fair published the pitch deck for the Fyre Festival last night, which sheds some light on how the festival was initially sold to investors. The presentation lays out the concept behind the cumulative delusion which turned into the events of Friday and this weekend, for our morbid enjoyment.
The Fyre Festival, it turns out, was actually designed to promote something called the Fyre app. The app, now a year old, is designed, as the lead slide lays out, to “help venues, brands, qualified bookers, and private buyers book talent for live performances, appearances, and paid social posts…” Just a few sentences into the presentation, it immediately reveals itself as likely the worst thing ever, with the pitch flanked by illustrative photos of “Musicians,” “Athletes,” “Models,” and “Influencers,” the latter of which is a white hipster doing ironic prayer hands, to be clear.
And that is only the beginning of an extended discussion of the “Fyre Squad” a.k.a. the team behind the app, the “Fyre Starters” (rich “influencer” types on the Kardashian or sub-Kardashian level) and other cosmically repulsive individuals:
Okay, here are the fucking “Fyre Starters,” most of whom did post several times to their social media pages about the festival without revealing that they were being paid to do so. Kendall Jenner, who isn’t having the best year on the pitchman front, also gets her own slide, which advertises the “6 million unique impressions” her social media accounts can rack up in under a week.
If your company ever pulls up something like this in a meeting, please quit.
There are all sorts of iterations of “fake news” in the Fyre Festival pitch deck, but none so explicit as what you see above.
Here’s the last of several slides introducing us to “The Fyre Squad,” or the motherfuckers that work under Fyre founders Billy McFarland and Ja Rule, and therefore helped make the greatest non-White-House-related scam of 2017 possible. Take a long hard look into the black, soulless eyes of “Fuck Jerry” (aka professional meme amalgamator Elliot Tebele) and then consider deleting every app from your phone.
Yesterday, the Fyre Festival founders — yes, including Ja Rule — were sued for $100 million. You can check out the full collection of pitch deck slides over at Vanity Fair.
This story originally appeared in Spin.