A US tech company says its chief executive has quit after he was apparently caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing a female co-worker, in a clip that went viral.
The clip showed a man and a woman hugging on a jumbo screen at the arena in Foxborough, Massachusetts, before they abruptly ducked and hid from the camera.
The pair were identified in US media as Mr Byron, a married chief executive of Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s chief people officer.
Before this
CEO: Who are they going to complain to? HR?!
Kristin Cabot, the firm’s chief people officer.
That’s not a good look 😬
She’s switching to Public Affairs.
Standard HR. Not a profession that’s renowned for moral and ethical integrity.
Well she is working with people. Two of them but one didn’t know about the other.
*didn’t
She took her job “people officer” too literally.
It was a great look at the “couple”
I get being embarrassed but resignation seems like an overreaction. Coldplay isn’t that bad.
Hey other tech CEOs, when you take your mistress to a concert where there’s a crowd camera, have a chat ahead of time about how to play it cool. Bet nobody would have noticed if they’d just smiled and been boring for a second until the operator moved on. That’ll be $50,000 please.
Inb4 his ex wife files for alimony+child support, and he tries to claim no income.
my understanding is the wife already changed her last name on facebook, so divorce filing is pretty much a given. He is definitely claiming no salary income, but she’s gonna grab him by the assets
Don’t these C-level guys usually get a golden parachute? He “tendered his resignation”, but probably still got some severance. Board could force him out but probably triggers some other vesting/equity clause. So having him “resign” but give him golden parachute.
Golden parachutes usually don’t involve inter-company affairs. He’s going to be lucky if the board doesn’t sue him for defamation of the company name essentially.
Per Axios report [1], Andy Byron appears to have negotiated some sort of exit package.
The company officially issued a statement Friday more than 24 hours after the story exploded, due in part to Byron’s slow resignation and exit package negotiations, another source told Axios.
These fuckers always get their 🧀 no matter what happens. Better to pay them off rather than stall it in court and risk attracting more attention.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/07/18/coldplay-kiss-cam-astronomer
Yeah, that’s fair. That sucks, I guess they took the easy path.
Well, fuck this.
Intra
Don’t forget about how he blames the Democrats for getting ‘canceled’ and gets a speaking role at the next Republican Convention.
That’s not how it generally works. If you quit, the court will impute an income and you will owe based on that.
That’s exactly why I said “tries”.
Seems like if they hadn’t reacted to their images on the screen, this whole thing would have gone unnoticed.
I’ve seen this response a ton and I think that’s exactly correct, but I can’t imagine the anxiety in the hours, day and weeks after. Just waiting and wondering if anyone recognised you, if anyone had a recording/proof. Then after a few months under the radar I might not be a complete train wreck.
But then what if Coldplay puts out a Netflix special or something, then I’d have to wait and wait until it came out and then watch it and see if that moment makes it into the recording… And if it does? Now I’m just waiting for some random friend of a friend to watch it and go “hang on…”
I think I’d rather this timeline, if I was that idot.
Probably why I’d never cheat on my partner, especially at a huge public gathering, when the person I’m cheating with is an employee and I’m the fucking CEO and could lose my job over it.
Thankfully this man will certainly continue to fail up, and as soon as this news quiets down he’ll get hired by some other goon just like him to some other lucrative job where you just have to be an asshole a few times a week and otherwise the money will roll right in.
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The reactions I’ve seen to this event make me cringe more than the event.
Yeah same for real though, are people this bored??
I think it’s less boredom and more more “hey a story that’s not about the world being on fire.”
CEOs world is clearly on fire 🚒
Definitely cringe af
I was interviewing with this company 💀. Withdrew my application/interview last week because of this.
Didn’t leave a reason. Just emailed recruiter, “I am no longer interested”.
Also, they have like 6-7 interviews with various people in company.
These multiple rounds of interviews to get a job are fucking ridiculous. They chose the pope in two fucking days, you do not need a week’s worth of interviews to know if I’m worth giving a paycheck.
To be fair, it has occasionally taken a very long time to choose the next Pope, which is how they ended up with the tradition of locking the cardinals up together and not letting them out until they’d made a decision in the first place.
tradition of locking the cardinals up
Seems like a good idea to implement all the time.
A lot of children would be living a better life.
I guess it depends on if they are interrogation style interviews or more of a getting to know you kinda thing. For my current job I had like 4 casual interviews and it was a blessing in disguise. I applied for a role that I was pretty tired of but had the most experience in. Without letting me know the first interviewers recognized that I had some skills that would fit well with a different position that wasn’t advertised on their homepage yet. In the end I was offered a job for the latter!
I know this is anecdotal and probably not how it usually goes. I also agree that 6-7 interviews is probably overkill. But multiple interviews aren’t always a bad thing.
Really? How would this have impacted you as an employee? And how do you know the other companies are different?
CEO having an affair with head of HR… The flag for rampant violation of company policy from above, nepotism, mix of private and professional life… really cant get more red unless the head of HR is also his daughter.
A ceo that’s fucking his employees is probally fucking his employees.
It also makes working for the company a punch line on your resume.
“Ohh, you worked for Astronomy? Wasn’t that the company where the CEO got cuaght fucking around at a Coldplay concert?”
The above may be a good or bad ice breaker at future interviews, but its still something you may have to deal with.
There’s an expression “fish rots from the head down”, meaning when the leadership of an organization is bad, the whole thing starts to stink. In this case, the CEO was having an affair with the head of HR, and was so unsubtle about it that he was caught like this at a public event. So, either the rest of the execs are completely unaware of what’s happening around them, which isn’t good. Or, they’re aware and did nothing about it, which is also bad.
Sure, this may be happening at plenty of other companies, but those CEOs have at least managed to avoid getting caught. Why work for the one company you know is troubled like this?
to be honest I buried the lede. I withdrew largely due to the long interview process. I had ghosted or left them on read for a week but the viral news reminded me.
Thinking how it would impact me directly? Probably not much. But this is a small company. If leadership is this sloppy at covering up extra marital affairs. How bad is it on the inside?
Shitty leadership in my experience often correlates with awful company culture.
Stock goes down, they lay people off to make it go up. And they will be without a CEO for a while. The fill in person probably will be at a disadvantage in deal negotiations because the topic of conversation will be the affair, not whatever product they are offering. That will also hurt the companies future prospects and stock price.
Stock goes down,
Why?
they lay people off to make it go up
This. Is. Not. How. It. Works.
And they will be without a CEO for a while
Substantial costs savings.
The fill in person probably will be at a disadvantage in deal negotiations because the topic of conversation will be the affair,
This is one of the wildest assumptions I have seen for a while.
That will also hurt the companies future prospects and stock price.
How?
Stocks often go up in the short term after layoff because of the substantial cost savings. Companies usually tie them to a change in direction to some new market that shows promise. In reality, they are getting rid of higher paid people that they will replace with lower paid people. So that will increase profits which tends to lift the stock price. If they are laying off due to poor business prospects for the future, that would lower the stock price. So it all in how they spin it, and in how the market for thier product is doing.
As for the rest, you don’t seem to know what a CEO of a small company does. This is a sub 500 person company. The CEO does a ton of networking to help get customers. And bigger companies will expect to be talking to the CEO, not a subordinate. So respect and clout are critical. Big company CEOs operate differently.
Pity. I hear they have an opening for CEO, with perks.
Take it and milk it.
Source: OE.
Just couldn’t handle the shame of being caught attending a Coldplay gig
I think the best joke I’ve seen about this so far has been
“Coldplay hasn’t put out a single in years, but in one night they made 2”
4 actually
…meanwhile. Elon Musk out here handing out vials of cum at parties. What a cool guy.
Maybe we need to reign in the upper class a bit.
This story is being promoted in the media to distract from trump being a child rapist
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Exactly. He can rape little girls AND women.
Also he can do all that raping AND also beat his ex wife because she was the one who suggested the doctor that did his hair transplant which then became painful (according to the court case that got paid off).
Furthermore he can do all that raping and beating and paying off of victims AND also bankrupt many casinos!
That dude is a multi tasker if I ever did see one.Yea it’s just obv promoted. Like what even is that completely irrelevant nonsense company
Never underestimate how much of the media and society love to see schadenfreude. It’s basically escapism from the daily onslaught of terrible news all the time.
If they had just made out like everyone else does, nobody would have cared who they were. It wouldn’t have gone viral. Wife still might have found out about it, but I don’t think that would have changed much.
Who is this referencing?
That’s James Hetfield of Metallica embracing Dave Mustaine formerly of Metallica and frontman for Megadeth
Is that them mocking it or is it an old pic?
Given their history, I am going to say the image is not real.
Lmao. I’d seen the photo floating around, but didn’t know the story behind it
Me too. Just realizing everything now.
I think we as a society need to get over compulsory monogamy. It clearly doesn’t work for everybody. Why must two consenting adults refrain from expressing mutual love for one another?
Don’t get me wrong, cheating is unethical and monogamy is still valid for those who want it. But the idea that monogamy is the most pure form of love is a social construct that has no basis in reality.
If you don’t want to be monogamous don’t get married. It’s an easy solution.
Why would marriage be an issue? It’s convenient for purposes of healthcare coverage, hospital visitation rights, guarantees that without a will stating otherwise your spouse makes all decisions regarding the disposal of your corpse, and they automatically inherit any wealth you have, and if you have military benefits in many cases marriage is required to transfer those, or have them automatically transfer on death.
I’m not monogamous, neither is my spouse, but we are married because of all the above reasons. Marriage isn’t about love and monogamy it’s about financial and death planning
You’re right to call out that marriage != monogamy. The comment should have been:
If you don’t want to be monogamous don’t get
marriedinto a monogamous relationship. It’s an easy solution.Except all those advantage of officially marriage cannot be enjoyed by people who actually want the polygamous marriage as the system does not recognize that.
Oh for sure, it’s incredibly frustrating, even more so since realistically no one is really fighting for poly marriage recognition outside a couple east coast towns. That’s great and all, but isn’t perfect by a long shot. I’ve toyed with reporting myself for polygamy (well technically it would be bigamy stauetorally) and trying to get it overturned that way, though looking through case law and the like I don’t really see a way that would work. And there aren’t enough of us to really easily get it on the ballot I don’t think.
That’s frankly a poor take.
On one hand, you’re arguing that the social and legal benefits of marriage should be exclusive to monogamous couples. Why should marriage require monogamy? It may imply monogamy by tradition but up until recently those same traditions excluded same-sex couples and we’ve moved on from that requirement by now.
Alternatively, there exist those who are married but practice some form of non-monogamy, e.g. swingers, porn stars, polyamorous couples, separated couples. Does practicing non-monogamy invalidate their marriage? You could argue that it traditionally would, but again, we’ve already moved on from traditional marriage. In reality, the only thing that invalidates a marriage is divorce or death. Monogamy is not a requirement.
On the other hand, you seem to be implying that committed romantic relationships outside of marriage aren’t widely and by default of social expectation (i.e. compulsory) monogamous. I’m certain you would be hard pressed to find anybody who would tell you otherwise.
You can be in a non-monogamous marriage. Quite common, actually.
Regardless, it’s still at the very least a grey area to get involved with a subordinate, and I think a majority would find that unethical regardless.
I think a majority would find that unethical regardless. Majority of Americans, no doubt. Majority of the rest of the world, probably not.
When I was beginning to work at the university, there was a professor who had started an affair with his student. Everybody knew about that, no one cared a s***. Later on, the student got employed at the department, and then they got married. The only thing I ever heard of it being talked about was that it wasn’t quite sure whether it was the student or her professor who actually did her “maturity exam” (a then-compulsory exam after finishing your MA thesis, the questions of which were based on the thesis).
