‘Lives have been detonated': Terrifying fact about Coldplay CEO

News.com.au

4 days ago

The memes, oh, the memes!
In the week since Andy Byron, the married CEO of Astronomer, and the company's similarly married head of HR Kristin Cabot were caught embracing on camera at a Coldplay concert, the internet has responded by what it does best: Copying and pasting. Heads and TV characters and politicians.
The meme output of Coldplaygate has been brilliant, prodigious, hilarious and the whole saga has been social media spawned, obsessively followed schadenfreude-laced soap. In short, the internet has been having a right good old time of it.
But with the vast benefit of more than seven days of hindsight, Coldplaygate should scare the pants off all of us.
Never before in history has one mistake, one moment, one stupid word or selfish deed or bad choice had the power to tear apart lives and to devastate peoples' worlds. To err is human – but for someone to film that erring and share it and have it so noxiously trend is decidedly 2025.
Andy Warhol argued that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame; today that phrase sounds less like a promise and more like a chilling threat.
What Coldplaygate lays bare is the danger of what happens when the very human impulse for shaming and a good old fashioned pile on is combined with the ubiquity of phones and the terrifying swiftness of the algorithm.
Virality and internet fame are now so often not a shortcut to celebrity and cash, something to aspire to, but something to fear.
What did Bryon and Cabot's lives and families look like at 6pm on Wednesday, July 16, the actual date of the concert? Very cookie-cutter, American dream-ish by all accounts. Spouses, kids, successful careers, impressive houses. Both were (and reportedly are) married and had big jobs at Astronomer, a billion-dollar AI company.
Then, in the space of 12 hours, Byron and Cabot went from being anonymous professionals to having hit a degree of internet infamy I'm not sure we've ever seen before.
That Wednesday night they attended a Coldplay gig at Boston's Gillette Stadium where the roving 'kiss cam' zeroed in on them as Byron held Cabot in his arms. Their immediate, instinctual reaction was called out by the band's frontman Chris Martin who told the roughly 55,000-strong crowd, 'Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy.'
The kiss cam moment had been filmed by 28-year – old Coldplay fan Grace Springer, who later that night, about 1am Boston time, posted the moment on TikTok.
The app's black box algorithm did its thing and within two hours the internet was reportedly already on the case and Byron and Cabot's identities were being ferreted out. By about 3am there was an uptick in Google searches for their names, Business Insider reports.
Before Springer had gone to bed the video had 'a couple of thousand views,' she later said. 'I woke up to seven million.'
Byron and Cabot's lives and their families' lives, had been detonated and the internet was hoovering it up, devouring the messiness, the stupidity, the ego. The video only spread and spread.
By midday on Thursday, less than 12 hours after Springer had posted the clip, it had generated more than 30,000 posts on X, per Insider. A few hours later, by that afternoon, Byron had been Googled more than two million times.
Within 48 hours he had resigned as Astronomer CEO and his wife Megan Kerrigan Byron, had removed 'Byron' from her surname on her Facebook account before deactivating the page.
Cabot has also since resigned from Astronomer and was photographed this week without her wedding ring.
The terminal velocity of this is breathtaking.
When Cabot finished her working day on that Wednesday, the day the video was filmed, she was a seemingly normal 56-year-old; now Us Weekly, Page Six and the Daily Mail are doing background pieces about her. The New York Times, The (London) Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN have all reported on this story. On Friday the Mail published photos of her in her garden at home. Just think about that – two weeks ago she was nobody and now she has a paparazzo outside her house.
The numbers around the Coldplay video are impossible to rationally compute. On Springer's original account alone, the clip has been viewed more than 127 million times. On the X accounts of leading Gen Z celebrity news sites Pop Craze and Pop Base, it has racked up more than 217 million views.
The combined viewer count on these accounts alone – 344 million – equated to every man, woman and child in the United States and four million Canadians having watched Byron and Cabot canoodling.
That is a nightmarish level of exposure.
George Orwell warned about a dystopian, governmental Big Brother – he could never have predicted that we would be both the watchers and the watched. We are everyone else's big brothers.
The degree of surveillance we now all live under, the fact that cameras are everywhere, means that mistakes and bad choices can devastate multiple lives in a way they never have before been able to.
RIP privacy. Anywhere and everywhere. Someone is always watching.
For a life to change in a moment, it used to take a bad diagnosis, being in the wrong place at a violent time, Mother Nature running her angry course. Now you just need to have someone pointing a phone in your direction at an inopportune moment.
What has also become clear in recent days is that Coldplaygate says something about how, in 2025, internet shaming, as New York University professor and investor Scott Galloway has argued, has become a form of group entertainment.
Some time around the 900s, the English took a break from getting the plague to invent the stocks. It was about ritualised, communal humiliation and shaming, a community being given permission to jeer and use up rotten spuds, a wrongdoer punished not physically but humiliating them.
Coldplaygate is a replay of that, minus the mouldy, lobbable marrows.
Who wins here? Byron and Cabot's spouses maybe but what a humiliating, gut punch of a way to learn about alleged infidelity.
Even Grace Springer who filmed it and now has more than 51,000 followers (and 11 million likes) has not really tangibly benefited, telling British breakfast TV this week, 'I've actually made no money from the video itself or the views'.
This week she added a link to her TikTok account for donations to pay off her reported $121,000 in student loans. She has not revealed if anyone has given her a $1.