It’s all anyone wants to talk about. At a time of unprecedented media fragmentation – where there are fewer and fewer shared cultural moments, because we’re all consuming content in deeper and deeper silos – the Coldplay affair has united us all.
On Wednesday 16 July, a man named Andy Byron was standing in the audience of a Coldplay concert in Boston. The band was playing “The Jumbotron Song” while a kisscam roamed around the stadium, landing on members of the audience and streaming their live reactions to 55,000 people.
There’s a sense of anonymity in a crowd of that size. I remember being a child at a basketball game and being terrified of the camera finding me. I didn’t want to see myself on the big screen, to have strangers watch as my cheeks went red and my mouth made the shape of an uncomfortable smile. I still have that reaction as an adult. Please don’t land on me. Please don’t land on me.
Andy Byron was probably thinking the same thing, albeit for slightly different reasons. But the camera did land on him. He happened to have his arms wrapped around a blonde woman, both of them staring adoringly at the stage. The moment they caught themselves on the giant screen, with the entire stadium’s attention on them, they jumped apart. Andy Byron ducked out of the frame, and the woman he was with – Kristin Cabot – turned around to hide her face. Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, commented from behind his microphone. “Whoa, look at those two,” he said. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy. I hope we didn’t do something bad.”
It turns out, Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot were doing something bad. They were indeed having an affair, as pieced together by some of the millions of viewers who watched the video when it was posted to social media. It was quite easy to figure out who this man was, and from there, quite easy to discover that the woman he was with was not his wife and the mother of his two children. Then came all the other things you can find out about a person from their online footprint. Byron was the CEO at Astronomer, a New York-based company that provides software solutions for data management. A company that, according to a trending post on LinkedIn, has a severe lack of gender diversity. His educational history suggests he might be Catholic (THE IRONY!), his social media shows he has two sons (WHAT A ROLE MODEL!), The Economic Times estimated his net worth to be between USD20 million and USD70 million as of 2025 (THE PRIVILEGE!), and his career trajectory paints a picture of someone with a reputation for aggressive growth and profitability (PSYCHOPATH!).
Of course, when a story goes viral, anyone who knows anything about content wants to find a way to be a part of it. I saw a video from a man who said he worked with Andy Byron years ago, and claimed Byron left young, naive people out of pocket when a business venture failed. Then there’s the fake apologies from people pretending to be Andy Byron, fake statements from his workplace, fake videos from his ‘daughter’. There’s power, now, in having something to say about this man. In being able to tear him down in a new way, a way that makes you part of the narrative.
It’s classic schadenfreude – pleasure in another person’s misfortune. But in the internet age, it’s also more than that. We’ve collectively decided that Andy Byron – a white man with lots of money who had the audacity to cheat on his wife in a stadium full of people – is a bad person. It’s astoundingly simple. Because he’s a bad person, there’s no limit to what we expect him to withstand. The memes and the commentary and the AI-generated statements, his photo plastered on the front-page of news sites around the world. He had no reasonable expectation of privacy at that concert, lawyers say (yes, lawyers are now weighing in). The further we dig, the worse this man becomes. Byron wasn’t only cheating, but cheating with the Head of HR. There was a rumour (which turned out to be a lie) that a woman standing beside them on the kisscam was also an employee at Astronomer, and had received a promotion very recently. Was he abusing his power to hide his affair? I mean, he’s the kind of man who cheats on his wife, so… probably!
But what does this public shaming, this outrage, this witch hunt, actually achieve? Who are we doing it for?
I suppose Andy Byron’s wife now knows she’s being cheated on, although I don’t think we can pretend this entire spectacle is for her benefit. Her name, too, is being published. Her photos trawled through, her life unpacked. We might think we’re restoring the moral order by deriding him, expressing a tacit solidarity with her, but I’d imagine she a) wishes this isn’t the way she discovered her partner’s infidelity (if that’s even what happened), and b) is far more concerned with the very real threats to her family’s privacy than a stranger’s virtual (rather patronising) pat on the back.
Are we doing it for women, broadly? Is this justice/vengeance/symbolic power for every wife and mother who cared for their family at home while their husband cheated on them in public?
Is this about wealth? Privilege? The level of unrestrained confidence it must take to assume that you can do shitty, unethical things and never have to face the consequences?
I think it’s about all of those things. Andy Byron is a Rorschach test, and we’re all projecting onto him the qualities of an ‘Andy Byron’ we’ve encountered in our own lives. The philanderer, the absent dad, the immoral boss. We’re also projecting onto him the full extent of the social ills he represents. He is the deep gender inequality that allows a father-of-two to cheat with a woman at work. He is the unjust system of capitalism that means some people get to be multi-millionaires while others are homeless. He is arrogance. He is privilege. He is misogyny.
But therein lies the problem.
Because as convenient as that reality would be, Andy Byron is none of those things.
Andy Byron is just a person. Flesh and blood. Like you or me.
He might be really, really generous. Laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps he cared for his sick mother, or mentored a group of disadvantaged youth. Maybe he struggles with his mental health. He clearly quite likes Coldplay. I also like Coldplay. Most of us like Coldplay.
If this were a novel, Andy Byron would be a character who never wanted to be the CEO of some confusing company. He’d be a guy who always dreamed of being a musician. Someone whose life doesn’t look the way he wishes it did. In the story, that misery would keep him awake at night, because he’s grown, now, and he’s made his decisions, and he’s not sure he has the time left to throw it all away and start again. At 2am, the weight of it all would hit this version of Andy Byron. He would lie awake for hours, contemplating the fact that he feels like a f*****g terrible person, a liar, a fraud. Over hundreds of pages, though, a reader would discover the qualities that redeem him. The parts of this man that connect him to us all.
Novels, of course, compel us towards empathy in a way 30-second clips on Instagram do not.
Maybe Andy Byron is none of these things. Maybe he’s one of those few people you come across in life who are, simply, awful. But maybe he isn’t. We don’t actually know.
Because there is so much the internet cannot tell you about a person. It flattens us and dehumanises us, and it demands we see each other as effigies – crude ideological symbols deserving of being burnt in protest.
The challenge of being human is that we are all more complicated than that. Including, as inconvenient as it is, cheating dirt bags like Andy Byron.Shameless self-promotion (ew): I’ve just spent years writing a novel about this exact idea, called The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done. It comes out 30 September, and you can pre-order it here.
This article was originally published by Substack.
