They paid thousands of dollars to attend a luxury music festival.

Instead, the wealthy millennials who descended on the Bahamas this weekend for the inaugural Fyre Festival became glamorous refugees in an unexpected danger zone. Imagine if revellers at Coachella were greeted with random muggings. Or if feral dogs roamed Glastonbury. Or if Woodstock was now remembered for the festivalgoers who desperately tried to flee in their Flower Power vans.

Almost as soon as the first chartered flights landed late Thursday for Fyre Festival, social media lit up with terrified reports that were at odds with the brochures.

Stunned attendees tweeted out pictures of the “exclusive cabanas” that were repurposed disaster-relief tents. Pictures circulated of the “gourmet cuisine” that was two slices of bread and processed cheese in a polystyrene box, the kind of grub that could start a prison riot. The venue looked like an abandoned construction site in a tropical ghost town, built atop a landfill of shattered rich-kid dreams.

This wasn’t a luxury music festival.

It was a possible United Nations rescue mission.

And by Friday morning, it was over before it got started.

“Fyre Festival set out to provide a once-in-a-lifetime musical experience on the Islands of the Exumas,” said organizers in a statement. “Due to circumstances out of our control, the physical infrastructure was not in place on time and we are unable to fulfill on that vision safely and enjoyably for our guests.”

With respect, give me a break.

You were the only ones in control. You were the ones who sold the tickets and presumably hired the contractors. This is why we have laws against false advertising and breach of contract. Claiming the “physical infrastructure” wasn’t in place on time for a music festival is like opening an amusement park without the rides.

You can see why conspiracy theories crystallized in the swirling chaos, including suggestions the festival was an elaborate hoax, a diabolical scam or a deranged sociological experiment.

The truth is probably less exotic: Fyre Festival is what happens when hype enters a mosh pit of reality. It is what happens when arrogance and incompetence take the mic and belt out folly.

The creators of Fyre Festival, rapper Ja Rule and entrepreneur Billy McFarland, set out to tap the wanderlust of “elite” millennials who might be willing to blow at least $1,200 and upwards of $250,000 on a weekend in paradise.

So in this age of Instagram, instant gratification and professional recreation, they enlisted key “influencers” — Gigi Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin — to promote a mission statement more about lifestyle extravagance than a “cultural event” that would feature Blink-182, Pusha T, Disclosure and Migos.

The real marketing gambit, on this private island once owned by Pablo Escobar, was to create a mirage and let attendees feel like the celebrities. Surrounded by yachts, supermodels and pure decadence, this was a musical festival in a time of selfies and narcissism: you went to be seen as much to hear.

The problem, though, is the geniuses tasked with making sure there was something to see proved laughably derelict in executing basic planning because they were too preoccupied with, yes, selling “the vision.”

So what we have is self-fulfilling ineptitude.

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Fyre came to life on social media. It was dead on arrival in the real world.

You know an event has really gone sideways when a government agency feels the need to distance itself while people are still amassed in its airports and begging to go home already.

“We are extremely disappointed in the way the events unfolded yesterday with the Fyre Festival,” said the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism on Friday. “Hundreds of visitors to Exuma were met with total disorganization and chaos . . . The event organizers assured us that all measures were taken to ensure a safe and successful event but clearly they did not have the capacity to execute an event of this scale.”

Clearly. This also explains why Blink-182 wisely bailed late on Thursday. The band probably figured there’s no point in playing a concert in which traumatized fans rush the stage to beg for food and clean drinking water.

And with unverified reports visitors were beaten, robbed and treated to random detentions — and with grimly hilarious accounts of how their designer suitcases were fired out of shipping containers and how they were basically made to feel like animals in a zoo run by rogue producers from The Hunger Games — I suspect Fyre Festival is not merely “postponed,” as organizers claim, but done for good.

Which is for the best.

On Friday afternoon, Ja Rule broke his silence via Twitter to say he was “heartbroken.”

“I don’t know how everything went so left but I’m working to make it right by making sure everyone is refunded,” he wrote. “I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT … but I’m taking responsibility.”

Taking responsibility without taking blame.

The perfect end to a festival built on smoke and mirrors.