By and by a beefy young man rolled up in an A.T.V.: this was Billy McFarland, the 25-year-old downtown-Manhattan entrepreneur who was the festival’s main organizer. Appearing frazzled, McFarland suggested that everyone who had booked one of the private villas follow him. But there were no private villas. There were no buildings to stay in, period. Instead, there was a cluster of carpeted tents.

“Suddenly,” Kumar says, “there was this mass rush of people running to the tents. It was just chaos. What should we do? We ended up grabbing two tents. The beds were damp. The carpet was completely soaked. It was like Survivor or The Amazing Race, gone really bad. People were stealing bedding. People were getting more and more drunk. We couldn’t leave our things, so we just stayed in the tents. It was just epic chaos. Their plan was to get everyone really drunk and they’ll forget how shitty this really is.”

Hundreds of would-be concertgoers were experiencing the same feeling—and this was only the beginning of the end. That night, as it became clear that the festival was collapsing, they were forced to scramble to find a way back to the mainland. Many took to chronicling their plights on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and that was what transformed the Fyre Festival from a failed music venue into a richly symbolic moment in Donald Trump’s deeply divided America. The Internet was ablaze in a firestorm of ridicule, with thousands of people without the money to frolic at Caribbean music festivals heaping abuse on “spoiled” millennials, who were freaking out because they were forced to sleep in tents and eat cheese sandwiches instead of sushi. “I can’t figure out what #fyrefestival is,” tweeted one, “but it seems like rich people having a bad time, which I fully support.” One woman tweeted: “I’ve always dreamed of building elaborate deathtraps that attract the 1%, but #fyrefestival actually went and did it, kudos.”

On the morning after, many searched for a precedent. “There is no precedent,” says Dan Berkowitz, the C.E.O. of CID Entertainment, a travel-experience provider best known for organizing V.I.P. packages for festivals such as Coachella and Bonnaroo. “At Lollapalooza it rained one year, but everyone just drove off. There’s never been something like this where people were stranded on an island. There’s never been anything of this magnitude. Thank God nobody got hurt. People could have died.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal of providing the experience we envisioned for the event, and I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend,” Billy McFarland said in a statement to Vanity Fair.

In the days following the disaster, journalists and lawyers rushed to pick over the festival’s corpse, churning out stories and lawsuits that painted its organizers as either clueless or fraudulent. The real story, it turns out, wasn’t in the mud and trash and beer cans left behind. It was back north, in New York, where for five years the boyish McFarland had charmed scores of writers, rappers, venture capitalists, and other denizens of the downtown club scene, including more than a few of his fellow millennials and their parents, into furthering his entrepreneurial dreams. A preppy kid prone to salmon-colored pants, he became a prisoner of his own promises, a believer in his own bull, and it led to one of the most spectacular failures yet in this new era, where social media, high finance, and high tech are jostling for ways to connect.

House of Cards

The Billy I knew at the beginning changed entirely,” says a downtown consultant who worked with McFarland. “At the beginning he was this young kid, from a nice family out in Jersey. He kind of progressed into somebody who was scamming and lying. It’s sad. You know, when they come to New York, the bright lights, some people can fake it till they make it, and other guys, well . . .”