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Kim Bhasin
@KimBhasin
, 17 tweets, 6 min read Read on Twitter
Let’s talk about the Fyre Festival one last time, now that the two documentaries are out. @polly and I spent a sizable chunk of our lives investigating it. It’s time to reflect.

Looking back, the most incredible thing about Fyre is just how deep the rabbit hole went:
The Fyre Festival saga began as a bunch of tweets and grams from kids that were comically worthy of mockery, then evolved into a near two-year-long financial fraud epic that landed someone in prison and I still can’t quite believe it.
A few days after the initial stories, a big lawsuit was filed – a $100 million class action from a high-profile Hollywood attorney – and it started to become more real. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Still, that was an expected outcome. Twitter was having fun bashing the youths that went on the trip. Vanity Fair shared the hilarious pitch deck with the world. The tone was still, “Look what Ja Rule did! Funny right?” I love this story: vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/f…
With every phone call, it got weirder.
Why isn’t the US embassy responding?
How the hell is the Red Cross involved?
Why doesn’t the Royal Bahamian Defense Force even know the Fyre Festival existed?
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Suddenly, the stakes rise. It turns out that the largest telecom in the US, Comcast, had nearly invested $25 million in Fyre through its venture arm. Fyre said it was worth $90 million. That can’t be right, can it? (It wasn’t.) bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Down, down, down the hole we go!! Investors ranged from individuals with some cash to spend to Silicon Valley VC firms to the wife of a chief investment officer at a $36 billion hedge fund. What the hell is going on... bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
This ended up being a big one. The Fyre Festival organizers buried themselves in debt – as much as $7 million – at preposterous interest rates. Money went missing. Six people worked on this story and it was totally worth it. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
I must remind everyone that the Fyre Festival affected *a lot* of people and they weren’t all rich kids or wealthy investors. Small businesses in the US and families trying to earn a living in the Bahamas were swindled.
So many things kept shooting out from everywhere.
Vice: “Should we be concerned about the FBI, Billy?” news.vice.com/en_ca/article/…
The Cut: “Let’s just do it and be legends, man” thecut.com/2017/04/fyre-f…
Mic's trove of leaked emails: mic.com/articles/17892…
Someone asked me, whatever happened to Billy's credit card company? We found out and, of course, it got more bizarre. Magnises had a spectacular implosion. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
We’re not even at the court case yet!! More and more comes out. Billy pleads guilty and is sentenced to 6 years in federal prison. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Details on the NY VIP ticket scam while Billy was out on bail came out last June. As @polly said in the Hulu documentary, “"When you're out on bail, that's when you want to be committing the least amount of crimes" nytimes.com/2018/06/12/art…
Here's a brief reminder to watch the Hulu documentary on the Fyre Festival. @polly and I spoke to them and she's in it spitting hot fire (fyre?). hulu.com/movie/fyre-fra…
The absurdity of the Fyre Festival managed to sustain TWO documentaries released around the same time, and plenty of people still watched both. If @polly and I wrote a book, I’m sure there’d be people reading it years from now. It’s uncanny.
After all that, I still don’t know the fate of Blink 182’s instruments that were seized by the local government.
@blink182 Hey did y'all ever get your equipment out of customs limbo in the Bahamas after the Fyre Festival?
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