Then, for good measure, he claimed, he hacked his teachers. I said, ‘If you give me a dollar, I’ll fix your crayon.’” “My first combination of technology and marketing happened in second grade,” McFarland said in an interview featured in Hulu’s Fyre Fraud.32 “I was put next to a girl who I had a crush on, and her crayon broke. In fact, it was almost like he needed to feel like the smartest person in the room before he could even get started on something.Īccording to McFarland, his first business venture occurred at the tender age of seven, when he apparently realized he had an opportunity to coax some money out of a girl he had his eye on.

McFarland and his sister grew up secure in the knowledge that they would be able to attend private colleges without having to take out loans, though McFarland wouldn’t end up making it past his freshman year at Bucknell.īut despite his comfortable upbringing, McFarland had a laser focus on making money-and he didn’t seem to care whether any of it was aboveboard. They had the requisite shore house, annual vacations to resorts in places like Aruba, and nice cars to drive around town. McFarland’s parents, Irene and Steve, made their money in the loosely defined arena of real-estate development. Like most of the families who sent their kids to the then-$30,000-a-year private school, the McFarland family lived in suburban comfort.

With his squinting, pinched smile, athletic build, and preppy style, he certainly blended in physically with the other primarily white, affluent kids at the Pingry School, the coed prep school in Short Hills, New Jersey, from which he was flung into the unsuspecting world in 2010. He was tall, stocky, and, one might say, sort of handsome-adjacent. In the beginning, Billy McFarland seemed average in every way.

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