Picture your ideal special night out with your sweetie. Full stadium, Coldplay up on stage (don’t judge! Well. Not yet), fireworks, Chris Martin in all of his dorky glory, and then comes the kiss cam. Suddenly, it’s your turn to be featured in front of 70,000 people with your sweetheart… and now it’s a nightmare because that sweetheart you’re snuggling isn’t your wife. You recoil like a vampire in sunlight as Chris Martin says, “They’re either very shy… or having an affair,” while the audience gasps in perfect harmony. You’re Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, and you’re now having a Very Bad Day.
Now you can judge. Andy Byron is the CEO of Astronomer, a billion-dollar AI/data infrastructure company. He’s also—currently—very much married to someone who is not Kristin Cabot, the Chief People Officer—i.e., the head of the HR department—with whom he was seen sharing a tender embrace while listening to Coldplay do what Coldplay does: make middle-aged men feel things. It wasn’t just a friendly lil side hug that the two were sharing when their image got thrown up on the Jumbotron. Oh, no. They were standing and snuggling in a full-on prom picture–style embrace. Quick as a flash, they broke apart, and the internet detectives assembled like it’s the Clocks video to pin down the identities of the (previously) happy couple. Faster than you can play through the intro to Viva La Vida, the LinkedIn sleuths, TikTok rewinders, and certified gossip girls of the internet tracked down their identities.
This isn’t just your everyday FAFO scandal. This is the mother of all Fuck Arounds. This Find Out is quickly becoming the workplace scandal of the decade. Married CEO + Head of People = icky ethics iceberg that is roughly the size of the monster that took down the Titanic. Seriously, this scandal has everything. Power imbalance, company policy violations, and has anyone even thought of the poor interns? Who do they even go to in a corporate custody battle? Anyhow, the company’s overall vibe is now less “healthy data cloud” and more along the lines of “toxic thunderstorm.” As an added bonus, the sleuths of the internet are pretty sure that there’s another employee smiling in the video. Talk about your layers of ick.
The backlash and resulting digital cleanup job has been swift. LinkedIn pages have been scrubbed, bios have gone dark, and the spouses of the cheating couple have allegedly gone offline too—and who can blame them?!?! One has reportedly already dropped her married name from online profiles like a rancid hot potato (and we low-key hope she didn’t sign a prenup, cause we’re rooting for her). Byron has issued an apology… ish. But it’s definitely not enough to clean up the mess he helped make. But hey. Nobody said it was easy… but he’s definitely the reason that it’s going to be this hard.
This CEO thought that he was at a concert, but it turns out that it was actually an audit sans accountant. Will Astronomer survive the new trajectory of their orbit? Employees are rattled, and investors are watching. There’s no official word yet on how everyone’s feeling from Astronomer reps, but I’m willing to bet that morale is plummeting faster than the chart numbers on X&Y. The company is now dealing with more than just bad optics. Where’s the corporate manual on how to recover camaraderie, integrity, and trust in one another after getting caught smooching the head of HR while being married to someone else? Anyone want to write that for them, cause they might need a hand.
Coldplay’s tour is titled Music of the Spheres, but this couple’s little on-screen oopsie-daisy turned that particular concert into a black hole. They may have looked at the stars and seen how they shone for them… but then they fell face-first into a career-ruining moment that could have easily been avoided by simply not having an affair. Moral of the story: if you’re going to risk everything on a paramour while married to someone else? Maybe avoid taking your sidepiece to events with a jumbotron.
