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Awkward Audio Emerges Of Fyre Festival Founder Telling Employees They're Not Getting Paid
By
David Colon
Published May 12, 2017
Modified May 12, 2017
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By
David Colon
Published May 12, 2017
Modified May 12, 2017
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Fyre Festival, the aborted exclusive music festival starring pretty people/inexhaustible fount of internet #content, is back with yet another tale of woe. Late yesterday, a conference call leaked (listen below) in which you can hear tech bro and festival founder Billy McFarland tell his employees that no one's getting paid. Also no one is getting laid off, which means no one is getting unemployment. Also something is going on with Ja Rule's phone, because what would even a conference call related to this mess be without something going wrong?
In the audio, obtained by Vice, McFarland speaks with a few employees of Fyre Media (the promotion arm of the festival) about the most recent issues related to the festival. But first, in an allegory for his role in the whole debacle, Ja Rule tells the people on the call that he's there but "can barely hear y'all because of this f*cking hum" before disappearing but promising to come back.
After Ja Rule takes off, McFarland gets to the extremely unfortunate heart of the matter and informs the employees of Fyre Media that "after conferring with our counsel and all plan people, we're not able to proceed with payroll immediately."
"I'm unclear as to how you're asking us to remain employed without paying us," a hero eventually asks, before McFarland informs everyone that he'd love everyone to stick around and work for free.
"So you're not going to lay us off, so we can't file for unemployment benefits. What you're going to do is just not pay us, forcing us to quit," another employee asks. McFarland then, stunningly, tells the group that he doesn't understand how people resigning on their own would impact their ability to get unemployment. Presumably he doesn't know this despite being a business genius because he skipped that chapter in the Big Book of Employment Law to instead tell models about his interest in technology, the ocean and rap music.
"We're not being let go, so we're just...here," one person asks, summing up the situation by presumably reading aloud from Waiting for Godot.
The conference call tracks with the experiences of Chloe Gordon, the talent producer who wrote about her experience with the rapidly deteriorating festival that culminated in her co-workers getting fired and the company offering a two-thirds pay cut to stick around The Island of Dr. Ja Rule.
In the mean time, the lawsuits against McFarland just keep coming, and organizers have wisely put their heads down and have just tried to figure out what to do next. Oh wait no they've apparently tried serving people who tweeted about the festival turning into a white whine refugee camp LARP experience with cease-and-desist letters. I'm starting to think that Billy McFarland isn't actually a business genius at all.
Tagged
disasters
fyre festival
ja rule
David Colon
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