The Coldplay kiss cam affair: a cautionary tale

It went viral so fast, everyone with an internet connection may by now have seen the fateful video clip of the US tech boss embracing his head of HR at a Coldplay concert, said Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times.

Last Wednesday, Andy Byron, the CEO of Astronomer, a $1 billion AI firm, and Kristin Cabot were swaying romantically at the stadium concert in Massachusetts when its "kiss cam" picked them out. "Ooh, look at these two," said Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, as their images were beamed onto "jumbotron" screens. But instead of relishing the attention, the pair separated in a panic: in the clip, Byron can be seen ducking from view while Cabot covers her face and turns away. "Oh, what? Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy," Martin can be heard saying. "Oh shit. I hope we didn't do something bad."

Irresistible schadenfreude

If only the couple had "kept their cool", they'd probably still be "blissfully anonymous", said Polly Hudson in The i Paper. Instead, the clip was immediately posted on TikTok, and before the concert had even finished, their identities had been posted all over the web: Byron was named as a married father-of-two; Cabot was said to be divorced. On Friday, the company launched an investigation; the next day, it announced that Byron, 50, had resigned.

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The "schadenfreude" of it all proved irresistible to the internet, said Abigail Buchanan in The Daily Telegraph: the tech boss "caught out canoodling with a colleague, the head of HR no less, in that most criminally uncool of contexts: a Coldplay concert". For days, the pair were "the most googled people on the planet".

Lives blown up

With depressing inevitability, brands soon got in on the act, said Olivia Petter in The Independent, posting jokes and mock-up versions of the clip. Internet sleuths dug into the social media accounts of the couple's relatives, while millions speculated online about the impact on Byron's wife and children.

Of course, the pair should not have been having an affair; and you could argue that they were foolish to conduct it in a public place. But you could also try to imagine what it might be like for these two, to have their lives blown up by a four- second video clip – and wonder what on earth happened to the concept of privacy.