The Coldplay Concert Scandal That Took Down a CEO

70,521. That's the number of news articles that included the name Andy Byron in the past week alone. And if you're wondering how a tech CEO ended up in a meme with cold bl. No, I'm not even going to say that. Of course you know how a CEO ended up in a meme with Coldplay lyrics and a parody ex account named Peter Ennis. You are not alone. Welcome to the PR Breakdown. I'm your host, Molly McPherson, and this episode is about that concert, that Kiss cam video that turned into an Internet feeding frenzy. And what happens when a name and a face and silence goes viral. I'm still laughing over the name. Let's break it down. The scene. Foxborough, or many of you may know it as Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts. It was a Coldplay concert, one that I wish I went to. It was a packed house on the Jumbotron. A man and a woman. The man's arm around a woman. Look at these two. All right, come on. You're okay. What? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. I'm laughing because I'm thinking of every meme out there. You know what I think my favorite meme of all was? The Phillies. The Philly. The Philly fanatic. The Philly fanatic. I don't even know the female fanatic. I'm a Red Sox fan, so I don't even know. I don't know what her name is. They recreated the moment where Andy Byron's arm was around his chief people officer, Kristin Cabot. Both, as we know, are currently reportedly married to other people. We all know that moment, right? The moment where they split on a substack live that I gave last Friday. One of the things that I focused on and other people were talking about as well is what happened. The moment of recognition that they saw their faces in the jumbotron. Cabot immediately felt shame. But Andy Byron, he ducked. And that says everything about that guy. More on that guy in a moment. By the next morning, I did some quick sloppy math. I was looking at 34 million views on the original TikTok post. But that number, 70,521, that's a number I called up today. Thank. Thanks to Muckrack, a new supporter to the podcast. I now have a PR platform that gives me all the news stories I need right at my fingertips. And this story had everything. Power Dynamics. After all, he was a CEO and he hired her. Also, HR entanglement, a Coldplay soundtrack, and a Fake CEO statement with zero public statement from Astronomer, the company that the Canoodlers both work for now. Thankfully, this viral crisis was not known as Coldplay Gate though some people were trying to make fetch happen there. But it really didn't need a name. All it needed was the clip. And there were plenty of social media threads, Reddit theories, Instagram memes. The whole machine turned on. This led to a story blowing up to even bigger proportions. The reason why is because no one spoke. Byron Cabot they didn't speak. It's not expected for them to speak, but they didn't say anything. But the company didn't say anything either. On a TikTok post from last week, I mentioned that if I were brought in to do crisis management for the company Astronomer, I would advise to not send out a statement right away even when the story was going viral, because the first statement needed to be to a key stakeholder and that was internal. The staff needed to know what was going on because all the young Gen Z staffers were all over this first. There is no doubt in my mind that this went viral, probably on a slack channel before it got to the board of directors. It was up to Astronomer Leadership, key leadership. They're privately held company backed by private equity. There are no shareholders there, but they did have a board and they needed to make a decision, right? They let it go too long. Ideally what you want to do is you want to make that HR decision right away so you can make that public statement because the fact that it is a company with investors, it has customers, it has key stake, it has key stakeholders. There needs to be a public statement because people want to know what's happening. But because it was private and there was no statement yet, I didn't say anything. That's the reason why I didn't hop on TikTok or social media to give my two cents, even though I was getting lots of requests, not only from friends and colleagues and people who work in the biz and the media biz, but from a lot of reporters as well. I had crazy reach out for from the press, most notably late afternoon from a national morning television program, also a national syndicated television program, another morning show outlet. They all wanted me to give a comment and I still didn't feel comfortable doing it because there wasn't an official statement yet from Astronomer. And I just felt like I was feeding the beast at that point. But another reason why I couldn't speak is because I literally could not speak. I had a dentist appointment in the early afternoon. I had to Get Novocainen. Because I'm a baby at the dental office, my Dennis gave me even more Novocaine, so my mouth was drooping a bit. Even if I wanted to go on air, I couldn't. Even if I wanted to do a long TikTok, I couldn't do that because I couldn't move my mouth. But a reason why I gave these media outlets why I couldn't do a press statement as well is because I had a hair appointment. I said, I made this appointment months ago. I can't cancel it. And I thought, gosh, the Molly McPherson of 10 years ago, 15 years ago, geez. Of two years ago, thinking of turning down morning television because I had a hair appointment. Now, why do I bring up this hair appointment? Actually pertains to. It actually pertains to the story. If you listen to my substack live last Friday, you heard me explain the story of visiting my hairstylist that night. Because when I first walked in, I said to Jess, hey, just so you know, I canceled the interview on this program because I needed to keep my appointment with you. And she's like, really? Why? What was the story? Here are the inside baseball stories that happened when I was at the salon. First, my stylist tells me one of the stylists went to Gillette then because as a favor to his buddy, another stylist who does all the artist's hair when they appear at Foxborough, needed the help. The guy from the salon did Chris Martin's hair that night and stayed there and saw the Jumbotron. I was like, what? I'm on my substack in my community in the thread, chatting kind of real time with everyone. And my substack, boy, do they deliver. Because everybody just went, ooh. They all jumped in. So we were having a great conversation. It was fun. Then my stylist says to me, just says, oh, my God, Molly, you will not believe this. A client wrote her to say they were with one of the two canoodlers. I don't want to say it because I don't want to give too much. There they were just with them, like on Monday night. So this was Thursday night. So four days earlier, they were with that person. Of course, have to immediately tell my substack community what was going on. And I love that two people in the community were saying, this is such a Boston story. And it really is a Boston story. I said to the group, I swear by the end of the week, I'm going to be in the inner circle of that story. After My appointment. I get in the car, I look on my phone and there is my group text from my girlfriends. We're all headed to the Vineyard this weekend for our annual vineyard trip. One of my friends in the group says, is anyone paying attention to the CEO story with Coldplay? Molly, you must be paying attention to it. Then my friend goes on to say that someone close to her one of the Canoodlers siblings wedding the weekend before I went. That's it, that's it. I didn't even get home and I'm already in the inner circle. My friend shared a lot of interesting details that frankly track so I'm headed to the Vineyard this weekend. So I'm definitely going to find out more now. Thanks to Angie. She's a member of my subset community. She sent a link to Men's Health magazine, I think it was with a response to the fake CEO post about Andy Byer. Astronomer finally started calling individual media outlets to debunk that post and say it was fake. It took them all day to stop the post. That was the fatal mistake that was made by Astronomer. I fully place the blame on them. It's completely understandable that it would take time to decide what they were going to do with the CEO. The concert only happened the night before. Maybe Andy Byron didn't even come into the office, which I think would be fair. They would have to track him down and talk to him and then they had to decide what to do. I'm going to give them the benefit of a doubt that there was an internal story and they probably were trying to hammer out an exit deal with Andy Byron. That's why it was so easy for me the next day just to make a guess and say, hey, this guy's going to be out by the end of the week. That's why Fox News they wrote me over the weekend asking if they could use my TikTok and they wanted a quote for me as well. And I went, nah, I don't want to do that. But they, they did me a solid and they called. Well, kind of a solid. They called me a TikTok. PR expert Molly McPherson accurately calls the fate of the Coldplay CEO. So I thank them for that. But honestly, we all called it. I read part of the Astronomer statement on a TikTok. I really don't need to read it again because it doesn't matter. It's just typical corporate speak. There's nothing special about their statement at all, except for two things. One, they outed the employee who was supposedly seen in the corporate Box with Cabot and Byron. That employee was misidentified because everybody's profiles were on LinkedIn and they could grab all that information. People immediately associated a girl in the box who kind of looked like an employee there. Then this poor girl, her name went viral as well. But the mistake that Astronomer made is they put her name in the statement. So then they made her go viral all over again. Now they were trying to attempt to quell all the speculation about her, but they didn't have to say her name again. So I think that was a mistake. And this statement, no surprise, came out late on a Friday afternoon and a summer afternoon. Let's talk about what was real and what wasn't. We stated the long apology attributed to Byron that circulated wildly. That was fake. And really, if you got to the point where the fake Andy Byron quoted Coldplays, fix you and ended the statement with lights will guide you. Also, the fake Facebook statement from Byron's wife Megan, that was also fake. I posted on TikTok. I'll include links in the show note. And I explained why that post was fake as well. It was tied to a spoof account and how we know that it was fake. It wasn't her account. We all know her profile photo, because profile photos on Facebook are public. But also, the writing was very similar to the fake Andy Byron statement as well. It was too lyrical, it was too artificial. I would bet anything it was written by AI. Both statements had EM dashes in it. And I had some grammar types come at me in my post saying, why are you saying that EM dashes are in AI and EM dashes don't like. Okay, I get it. No one loves an EM dash more than me. It's my favorite punctuation. But ChatGPT does use EM dashes a lot. And I don't write in EM dashes anymore. I used to love EM dashes because they're so prevalent in artificial intelligence assisted language. It's also because it was formatted poorly and it didn't come from any verified source. It didn't come from the press. It didn't come from a law office or anything like that. It just came from, like, Manhattan. But there was a lack of intent. There was the lack of why, like, why are we even getting the statement? The writing was to hook you to get into the statement, to share the statement, to engage with the statement. They wanted people to share the statement. And that's exactly what happened. The statements went viral. The personal lesson from a reputation point of view, I mean, look at Megan Byron, her name went viral. This is a woman who did nothing. She was sitting at home, not at Coldplay, but her Facebook page changed drastically. Very quickly. We could see her reaction to the crisis in real time. First, her married name was dropped from Facebook because likely Megan Byron was thinking this was a very personal crisis for people who she knew, like on Facebook. But then she likely started getting inundated with press calls and then made her Facebook page go dark. Of course, that leads to a lot of speculation. Was she distancing herself? Was she reacting privately? Again, it's private. It shouldn't matter. And believe me, journalists were working overtime trying to verify all this information. I had some people online in the comments saying this was a media generated story and they were blaming the press. And I replied back, no, this was not a media story. The media was not perpetuating the story. Social media was perpetuating the story. Astronomer not commenting. That's what fueled the fire. It wasn't the press. I was speaking to the press. They were all trying to verify the statements. The first time I saw a verification was from Variety. Astronomer did eventually respond. They did debunk the hoax, but it took way too long. And then of course, the next day came the resignation. I thought for sure they would do it in the morning again. What did they do? They waited until Friday afternoon. Why wait that long? Particularly when we know based on the interim CEO, that they like the press. Now, this is a part of the Astronomer statement that I did not like because the statement is one that I felt was a little off kilter. It came from the Astronomer Interim CEO Pete DeJoy. He shared the statement on LinkedIn July 21st. So this is two days after Astronomer announced that Andy Byron had resigned. You'll have to let me know what you think of this quote. The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies, let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world ever encounter. The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team. And while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name. End quote. I hate that quote. I really do. It's like he's taking glee. It's like he's stepping on the corpse of his predecessor. I think it's in bad taste. They should have released the one statement about the CEO and that's it. Done. Not leverage the press. It's a bad look. So as of the time of this recording, Byron has stepped down. And no public statement from Kristin Cabot. She's still employed at Astronomer. Now let's talk about what all of this actually means, because this wasn't just a gossip headline. It was a live case study in workplace power dynamics. He was the CEO. He did hire her Digital Impersonation Meme culture. Oh my goodness. I said this in the TikTok. This was peak meme culture. But it was also a case study in the collapse of communication control in real time. And we've seen all of this before, but we haven't seen it at this speed because there was a delay in the response. In other words, they weren't acting fast enough behind the scenes, and it gave room for false narratives to bloom and take root because they did not say anything to debunk that statement. So for communicators and leaders, the lesson is clear. If you don't say it, someone else will. And they will say it a lot better than you. And they'll probably use a lot of em dashes. The only things confirmed in this story are the video, the identities, and the resignation. Everything else is a mix of speculation, parody, and digital debris. This is what happens when a story hits the algorithm before it hits the boardroom. If you're in a position of leadership or advising someone who is and you think this could never happen to us, you're not paying attention. Because we're not just in a news cycle anymore, we're in a reaction cycle. My thanks to the supporter of this podcast, Muckrack, for giving me the tools to quickly find all the stories about this story. That's all for this week on the PR Breakdown. Just remember, everyone, sometimes the most viral part of a crisis isn't what happened, it's what people think happened. Bye for now.