The founder of the disastrous Fyre Festival — a 2017 music festival that was cancelled during its opening weekend, leaving attendees stranded and starving on a remote island in the Bahamas with no musical performances — says he wants to have another go at running the event.
Billy McFarland, who served four years in prison after being convicted of wire fraud for his role in securing financing for the original festival, tweeted on Monday that "Fyre Festival II is finally happening".
Responding to a commenter who replied "Tell me why you shouldn't be in jail", McFarland also alluded to the fact that he still owed creditors $US26 million ($39 million), saying "It's in the best interest of those I owe for me to be working".
The original Fyre Festival was a fiasco that resulted in multiple lawsuits, prison time for its founder and two highly successful streaming documentaries that chronicled the chaos.
Promoted as two transformative weekends on a remote island in the Bahamas featuring "the best in food, art, music and adventure" and the ability for guests to mingle with celebrities, the event turned out to be a dud, with no musical performances or celebrity guests at all.
Ticketholders arrived to find workers were still preparing the site for the festival, which was a car park next to a Sandals resort instead of a private island "once owned by Pablo Escobar".
Instead of the luxury villas they had been promised, guests who had paid up to $US12,000 were provided storm-damaged FEMA tents with wet mattresses inside.
The event quickly deteriorated as social-media-savvy attendees live-tweeted their experience, including waiting in long lines for registration, fighting over insufficient tents, being provided with inadequate and poor-quality meals, and being locked in an airport terminal without food, water or air conditioning.
Event organisers blamed poor weather and "circumstances out of our control" for their inability to have the festival's physical infrastructure in place on time.
It was later revealed the festival's top musical acts had pulled out in the days prior to the event due to a lack of payment.
McFarland pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2018 for using fake documents to defraud investors and a ticket vendor out of $US26 million.
Rapper Ja Rule, the co-founder of the festival alongside McFarland, was also named alongside him in a number of lawsuits, but was cleared of legal wrongdoing, later claiming he too had been scammed.
The high-profile failure of Fyre Festival also prompted tighter enforcement of influencer regulations in the United States, after it was revealed celebrities including Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowksi had promoted the festival on social media without disclosing they had been paid to do so.
A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of ticketholders was settled for $US2 million in 2021, meaning attendees were set to receive payments of up to $US7,220 each. However, a subsequent bankruptcy ruling slashed that payment to just $US281.
A number of Bahamian locals are also reportedly still out of pocket after not being paid for their work on the festival.
McFarland hasn't released any further details of his plans to restart Fyre Festival.
However, he tweeted on April 3: "I was one of the most Googled people in the world. What's next will be the biggest comeback of all time."
The following day, he tweeted: "Hey @50cent wanna chat?"
