It’s a match made in meme heaven.
LimeWire purchased the Fyre Festival brand for $245,300, the former file-sharing company announced Tuesday.
Fyre Festival’s branding was sold on eBay back in July, but the buyer remained anonymous until LimeWire issued a press release Tuesday subtitled, “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” said Julian Zehetmayr, CEO of LimeWire. “We’re not bringing the festival back — we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches.”
Both brands have been through tumultuous histories. Fyre Festival promoter Billy McFarland served four years in prison and LimeWire was functionally shut down by a federal court in 2010.
But in 2022, Zehetmayr and his brother, Paul, bought the LimeWire assets and attempted to rebrand the company as an NFT platform. Meanwhile, Fyre Festival’s story retained relatively rare staying power as a reference for overhyped events and disastrous consequences.
However, the bidding war was somewhat tame when McFarland put the brand up on eBay, and he even bemoaned the $245,300 sale price as “so low” when the auction finished.
LimeWire wasn’t the only group interested in Fyre Festival, though. Ryan Reynolds’ company Maximum Effort was also among the bidders, and the Zehetmayr brothers said they plan to work with Reynolds to use the Fyre Festival brand.
“Congrats to LimeWire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest,” Reynolds said in Tuesday’s release. “I look forward to attending their first event but will be bringing my own palette [sic] of water.”
LimeWire has not announced any “Fyre Festival” events yet, instead promising to “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre” in the coming months.
