A timeless lesson from the Coldplay incident: America loves to hate CEOS
But the video went viral after internet sleuths quickly outed the couple as Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, a New York startup, and Kristin Cabot, the company's chief people officer.
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In the fallout, the company issued a statement saying it had put Byron on leave pending an investigation. He resigned soon after, and he, his wife, and Cabot all reportedly deleted their social media accounts.
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Meanwhile, meme makers cranked out countless comic takes and parodies featuring the likes of the
What's been dubbed 'Coldplaygate' would all be good summertime fun — except that lives and careers have been turned upside down. And the glee with which the internet pounced on Byron underscores some not-so-humorous realities of American business life.
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In The New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, 'The moment seems to encapsulate the pervasive schadenfreude within our culture, especially our office culture, and a deep-seated animosity toward bosses and colleagues.'
CEO resentment is indeed widespread. It's been fueled by decades of excessive pay and a growing cynicism about capitalism and the inequality, greed, and lack of accountability it breeds.
In 2023, CEO total compensation at S&P 500 averaged $17.7 million, according to
The December assassination of Brian Thompson, chief executive of UnitedHealth, sent shockwaves through the corporate world. Thompson was shot on the street outside of the New York hotel where he was scheduled to give a presentation to investors.
Prosecutors say the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, may have targeted Thompson because he embodied a health insurance industry that Mangione believes does all it can to avoid paying claims. Mangione has pleaded not guilty.
Big-name CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg draw most of the public's ire.
Neither Byron nor Astronomer were well known outside of their niche of 'DataOps,' a category of software that pulls together raw data and formats it for easy analysis.
But Byron's relative anonymity didn't matter to the internet. A CEO is a CEO.
Moreover, the irony of cheating with the head of human resources was too much to resist. In the modern workplace, HR isn't just about vetting job candidates and managing benefits — it's the morality police.
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If the chief executive and chief people officer don't follow the rules, who will?
Larry Edelman can be reached at
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