The Coldplay Couple Brought "Main Character" Back

How a canoodling concert couple gave us exactly the kind of low-stakes, zero-calorie scandal we needed.

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It feels like it’s been forever since we had an honest-to-god “main character” online, a relic from the days of Bean Dad, Ken Bone, or the pot of chili lady. It was hard to imagine it was even possible anymore, until Andy Byron became one earlier this week. All it took was the instantly viral video of Byron embracing his alleged employee on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Mass.

“Oh, look at these two,” Coldplay singer Chris Martin said when Byron and his “friend,” Kristin Cabot, showed up on the Jumbotron (per the New York Times and others).

Then there was the reaction we all saw. “Wow, what? Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy. I’m not quite sure what to do,” said Martin.

Imagine a moment so awkward you make the guy who was married to Gwyneth Paltrow feel weird.

I’m always hesitant to try to pin down what factors made a video go viral, when the most obvious fact was that I sent it to a group a chat as soon as I saw it, and a lot of other people clearly did the same. Probably easier to ask why I sent it than to make assumptions about why other people did. It wasn’t anything deep. Probably just the transparency of their “caught” reactions making it all the more obvious what had just happened, like when I see my dog hanging his head in shame and then I have to figure out what he chewed up. It’s always entertaining when the guilt is more apparent than the act itself.

By the time I saw it, the man, Byron, had already been identified as the CEO of a software company, and the woman, Cabot as his “chief people officer,” which is what tech companies have taken to calling the head of HR. The fact that each additional detail uncovered seemed somehow more on-the-nose than the last surely added to the shareability. Sometimes things are exactly as they seem! There’s something reassuring about that.

In a world where the only two kinds of news stories seem to be bad and worse, and in which we increasingly no longer have shared references for pretty much anything, there was something beautiful about the “big story of the day” being something so harmless and banal as two middle-aged corporate Americans having an affair at a concert and everyone almost instantly knowing about it. I’ve been on vacation this week and even I knew about it. You didn’t even have to be that online.

That the two people caught acting like naughty teens happened to be the CEO and the head of HR — essentially the two most adult adults at the adult factory — caught at a concert for one of the most boringly middlebrow bands in the world, only deepened the effect. As I wrote on BluSky (we all had to get our little jokes in), I always wondered who listened to Coldplay, and as it turns out the perfect answer was right there (a software CEO cheating on his wife with the head of HR).

We’ve since learned that the company they worked for was called Astronomer (a “private infrastructure startup,” whatever the fuck that means), that Byron was still married and Cabot divorced. There was an apology letter from Byron that went around almost as fast, but it turned out that one was fake (in retrospect, the fact that the “apology letter” quoted a Coldplay song at the end of it probably should’ve been a tell). Byron has since been “put on leave” though, that part was real.

According to the New York Post, Byron was also allegedly a “toxic boss,” whose former employees were “laughing their ass off and enjoying the hell out of what happened and him getting exposed,” per their anonymous source.

I’d call that getting Milkshake Duck’d, but that term is generally reserved for a viral character who starts out beloved, and a guy having an affair probably doesn’t qualify.

Does the possibility of him being a bad guy make you feel better about dining out on his misery? The fact that he was a rich guy, and possibly a shitty boss?

The New York Times tried desperately to turn the story into a teachable moment, with their recap headlined “‘Coldplaygate’ Is a Stark Reminder That Cameras Are Everywhere.”

Hm, was it? Seems like we’ve known that for quite some time. Jumbotrons have been around forever, and awkward Jumbotron videos have been a staple of America’s Funniest Home Videos since the nineties.

Each new piece of additional information seems predictable to the point of being unnecessary, which only underlines what was so irresistible about the 20-second video in the first place. We already had cheating, tech companies, and Coldplay, enough material to power a day’s worth of stupid jokes. Anything else feels like an attempt to rationalize enjoying what already started out as the most low-stakes kind of scandal. Would it make us feel more okay about the dunking if the involuntarily famous people somehow “had it coming?”

Did they? Eh. Whatever. Probably no more or less than anyone else. A worthy sacrifice to the Gods of keeping us sane.

I don’t need to feel falsely virtuous to enjoy a spontaneous moment. It was nice to have a stupid scandal that didn’t carry with it the weight of eventually making our lives worse for a change. And in a world where every corporate professional seems to be playacting some anodyne, puffed up multi-syllabic conception of “adult” full-time — “LinkedIn People,” I call them, whose actual job duties are always as impossible to parse as their companies’ mission statements — it was, of course, immensely pleasing seeing the facade stripped away to reveal a couple of older folks acting like necking teenagers.

The sheen of professionalism fell away for that one split second, and then again when they reacted with instantaneous shame upon seeing themselves so exposed. If only they had just smiled and waved, played it off like everything was normal, none of this would’ve happened.

It was fitting that the story that finally knocked this one out of the discourse cycle was the Wall Street Journal’s reveal of a birthday card Donald Trump had allegedly written to Jeffrey Epstein — in which Trump had doodled a naked lady with his signature intermingling with her pubes. That story was funny and meme-worthy too, (“I never wrote a picture in my life” said Trump), but more in the way we’ve come to expect. Where it’s not just a funny story, but also a Sad Sign of the Times, and can only be interpreted through the prism of one’s politics. Trump reacted in ways the canoodling Coldplay couple couldn’t, of course. He did what professional liars do. Play it off as normal. Deny deny deny, and then sue everyone involved.

But Andy Byron and Kristen Cabot could do that. They were too human for that one split-second, and by the time it was over the damage had already been done, them blushing with self-incrimination for all the world to see. Again, reassuring, in a way. It turns out, even two boring corporate drones enjoying one of the most boring bands in the world still have a sense of shame. And that’s beautiful, to me.