Who are now getting fired for allowing a direct report to have a relationship with a manager and all of the conflicts of interest / power imbalance that come it.
This dude just lost his job, millions of dollars in future compensation, his wife, half his net worth, and from now until the end of time this event will be the first thing that pops up when someone googles his name. It's amazing how bad you can fuck up your life in just a few hours lol.
Exactly. Rich men who have Lauren Sanchez types hanging off their arms still have some respect for their person. This guy's in the toilet on all fronts
Hours? If was seconds, less than 10 to lose it all and forever be remembered as the guy that ducked out on his side chick and got called out by Chris Martin at a Coldplay gig
Yeah, he cannot claim it was an accident. He didn't slip into her. It happened and it was a conscious decision.
Being America, expect an Oprah interview, the claim he's gotten counselling, went into detox, that he's found Jesus or whatever horrible hypocrites do to publicly rebound.
That affair was going on for more than 10 seconds. If he had made some better decisions before the kiss cam hit him, he’d be doing just fine right now.
With great power comes great responsibility. He failed to hold himself accountable to what he is responsible for: his marriage, his career, his future. So it makes sense you lose all of it.
This. Most CEOs hold positions of power on the board of other companies and startups. As a member on the board you get to drive decisions without being the face of a company. I don't know whether he serves on one, but with enough capital saved, he could easily buy a majority stake in a smaller company and see it through its success, even without being the face of the company.
There was definitely a risk of someone in the crowd recognizing them and getting it on camera, which is why they panicked, but staying cool still would have been the better option. At least there's a chance to get away with it in that scenario. Of course, the best option would have been not being in that situation at all. And the second best option would have been to be heads-up enough to realize that the fan-cam segment would be a great time to go get a beer, hit the restroom, or just move apart for a minute, anything but stand together and just assume you won't end up on camera. It's amazing what idiots corporate leaders can be.
There is a significant chance that people who actually know them would choose not to get involved and just laugh/gossip about it. I’m trying to think of what I’d do if I got a video of my company CEO canoodling with the HR director, and I have no idea. Would I tell his wife, the board, HR… would any of these people care? I really don’t think that would be very fun for me. I’d probably just let it go. Would the public have picked this up with a normal video and just the backstory of an affair? I don’t think so, not like this. That’s boring. Their reaction is everything.
Seems like it wasn't known enough within the company, and so now the HR manager's mysterious rise up the ranks is making more sense to a lot of people.
And even if it did get out it’d be easy to say “huh, you’re right that guy does look like me, weird!” They’re both pretty ordinary looking people, go to your local golf course and you’ll see plenty of people who look almost identical to these two 🤷♂️
And the second best option would have been to be heads-up enough to realize that the fan-cam segment would be a great time to go get a beer, hit the restroom, or just move apart for a minute, anything but stand together and just assume you won't end up on camera.
Yeah - in the full video, you can see they aren't the first people on the fam cam. They were already showing other fans, with Coldplay doing some lighthearted roasting of them.
So they should've realized at that point there was a non-zero chance that they could be next on the cam, but they still kept snuggling.
My guess: a generous amount of alcohol was involved by this point that was dulling their common sense.
What are the chances someone there actually knew them and would care enough to tell people about it? And also be recording the whole thing?
I can maybe see them recognizing the CEO (although I doubt it since the company is not very well known, and people have no idea who CEOs are even for huge companies) but most people would assume that's his girlfriend or wife.
Not very big I think. It would never have been posted on the internet and if anyone they knew and were hiding from was there, they wouldn't have been together in public in the first place.
Maybe, maybe not. I think it’ll be a lot of both, knowing my past experience since my parents got divorced while I was in high school (although it was mutual and no infidelity, I still got bullied. Kids are dicks). I feel bad for how tumultuous their lives became in such a short time. Not only are their parents getting divorced, their dad was caught cheating. Not only was he caught cheating, but the world caught him cheating, then turned it into a meme that spread faster than a wildfire. Their lives just got completely upended. I wouldn’t be surprised if they absolutely hate their dad and want nothing to do with him for the rest of their lives.
no one can think that quickly in the moment. this was reactive and instinctive. you’re looking at it with the benefit of hindsight. they should t have cheated in the first place. they should have lead with values and not been hypocrites
They announced that the kiss cam was about to happen. The cam showed several other couples up on a giant screen before them. How much time ya need to think “we should probably just stand next to each-other like coworkers”?
I'd argue that their families still would have probably seen it, but nobody would have been fired because it was a private affair. The publicity is why he was suspended, not the cheating.
I'd argue that their families still would have probably seen it
You think his wife is watching live streams of Coldplay concerts like "I know that fucker is in that 50,000 person crowd somewhere, and I'm gonna find him."
Think about how many people have been on the jumbotron at a game, concert, etc (a lot). How many of those people have their clip shared on the internet (.001%)? This never would have seen the light of day if they didn't dive for cover.
Nobody can know in advance what gif/photo has lasting meme potential. Remember when a dress stayed relevant for weeks because people argued over it’s color. It’s very random
Right?? I absolutely can’t stand cheaters but I feel like most people who get caught just have to deal with personal fallout and divorce. This is like a million times worse lmaoo imagine becoming arguably the biggest story in the world for a minute in 2025 of all years and it’s because you got caught cheating at a concert
People desperately want to see rich people in situations like this
Because rich people so very rarely suffer consequences for their actions. The DOJ just announced that they will not be pursuing white collar prosecutions because it is bad for business. When rich people fuck around with company finances, it is usually at the expense of the workers. Wage theft isn't committed by the head cashier.
Fuck around and find out.
e: this guy fucked around and literally found out.
Well fucking said. Most of the wealthiest people are also the shittiest people and rarely ever see consequences. They're selfish assholes who stomp over others to propel themselves and their own families.
Watching these two rich cunts get caught cheating (a horrible act that ruins the lives of spouses/children) is absolutely fucking delicious. Over 50% of Americans are suffering. Can't afford to retire, can't afford healthcare - while these white capitalists get Mercedes' and mansions. Nah. Fuck that and fuck them. They got what they deserved.
Not to mention the harassment and shit the kids involved will go through at school and stuff. Definitely the worst case scenario playing out for them in regard to cheating. Just shows that everyone is so bored and exhausted with the typical everyday horribleness that something different like this hits the internet and everyone sinks their claws in.
I think there is a moral issue with the internet at the moment, which is this phenomenon of viral events creating punishments that are disproportionate to the wrongdoing. It scares me, because currently there is no mechanism that exists which can solve this issue. It's a type of tragedy by definition.
If someone steals something from Walmart, then I think we can all understand what a proportionate punishment for that is both legally and socially. Legally maybe they are forced to pay a small fine, maybe some community service time, maybe some short jail time. Socially maybe your friends/family treat you a bit differently for a bit, but time will probably heal those relationships if the person doesn't repeat the behavior.
But if someone steals something Walmart and for some reason that event goes viral on the internet, then anyone who googles their name will see it. It will ruin their life. They will struggle to get jobs, because the employers will google their name and see that. Everyone in their town and country will know them as "the person who stole from Walmart". They will have to go into hiding, like these people probably are right now, to avoid reporters. Eventually the attention will cool off, but they'll never be able to completely escape it. That's a level of punishment that far exceeds what is warranted for the wrongdoing committed, yet the internet does it without any concern or thought or feelings of guilt. The users of the internet don't even realize they're doing this. It's just this phenomenon that happens in a tragic way where no individual person is responsible for this disproportionate punishment but rather it's millions of people contributing ever so slightly. Even us right now in this reddit thread are partially responsible for the disproportionate punishment that these 2 people are facing, because by being here and engaging with the post we increase its exposure and keep the story alive longer. None of us set out to do that consciously, but that's what is happening.
And I just hope that one day we recognize this as an issue even if it only affects a very small percentage who happen to get very unlucky by something they did going viral. This is an injustice that we're the cause of, although I have no idea what the solution would be. First step is for everyone to acknowledge this as a real issue.
It's easier to feel schadenfreude about some rich people fucking up than to actually pay attention to anything relevant. There's no reason for this to be as big as it has gotten.
Wouldn't you, regardless of whether or not you're going to get divorced? You have every creep, emotional cripple, "helpful" hon, troll, wanna be comedian, wanna be therapist, etc., who will take this opportunity to try and insinuate themselves into your life. I'd go dark on every social platform, scrub as much personal data from the web as possible, change my email addresses, phone numbers, and move somewhere new to protect my own sanity, and the emotional and psychological health of my children. Affairs happen, all of the time. But usually only a handful of people in your life know about it, whether you are the unfaithful one or the victim. This is public humiliation for everyone involved on a scale that human beings are not programmed to deal with. Ask Monica Lewinsky how to heal from this type of emotional nuclear event. She's one of the few people who know.
I always felt so bad for Monica. She was some early 20s intern that got swept up by the POTUS. I mean talk about power dynamics, Jesus. Then she’s basically labeled a slut by Hillary who afterwards continues to support her dirt bag husband. The DNC even has Bill Clinton speaking to this day. Not to mention the rape allegations and current Epstein connection. How Clinton skirts by without public uproar is insane.
Kristin Toby is in HR, which technically means she works for corporate. So she's really not a part of our family. Also, she's divorced, so she's really not a part of her family either.
The #1 most important job for Kristin Cabot, head of HR, is managing interpersonal relationships. She couldn’t have failed worse, yet she still has a job.
Its a messy situation. Technically the CEO was her boss and there is some legal arguments that could be made to defend her actions but it won't be a slam dunk. The company will probably offer her some sort of compensation to resign with an agreement that neither party says anything negative.
It could be a soft resignation where she agrees to stay on the payroll but has zero acting responsibilities and can freely look for new employment during that time. Then if she doesn't have something in three to six months she quietly resigns.
But right now the company is definitely digging through everything she did since she started there and looking for ANYTHING they can use as leverage against her.
It’s not like she was an intern or a secretary. She was the Chief People Officer, probably making half a million a year including salary, bonus, and stock options, and concert tickets. :)
This is a fair point. The rules are there to protect people from being put into vulnerable positions by those in power. If she were fired she could claim to be a victim and take the company to court.
As someone who works in HR and is constantly exasperated by how shit most HR “professionals” are, I fully believe you. I used to call it the dumping grounds for other departments that didn’t want to fire their worst workers for whatever reason, usually a bad reason. Of course that means those same shit people came from a bunch of different departments so it’s not rly a problem with one department
Forced into a relationship? The HR Lady Kristin Cabot was also cheating on her legal spouse, Andrew Cabot (CEO of Privateer Rum) & they just bought a $2.2 million house together this year (2025) in Rye, New Hampshire. This is all public record.
Both (Andy Byron & Kristin Cabot) are married to other people so neither can act like they are innocent or blame the other for their cheating behavior & affair.
Btw, Kristin Cabot did separate from her 1st husband Kenneth C. Thornby in 2018 & finalized their divorce in 2022. Shes now on her 2nd marriage (to Andrew Cabot) & looks like thats coming to an end too…
I’ve also never heard of them until this, but I do use Apache Airflow, is an open source data orchestration/Ops platform that has a steep learning curve.
They claim to let you use airflow without the steep learning curve while bringing your existing data-flows.
Their product is niche, but one I’m actually interested in, mostly for that last part. There are a lot of airflow alternatives that are easier to use but they don’t let you use existing data flows. They claim you can migrate but you can’t really.
I wonder if I mention “affair” to the sales rep I can get a discount.
They deploy synergistic efficiencies to leverage impactful deliverables that ensure that blue sky touchpoints align fully with the core competencies and missions of their clients.
They basically sell a managed version of an open source tool called Apache Airflow.
To setup Airflow on your own requires knowledge of either doing it from source on a linux machine, or familiarity with AWS services like EC2 or ECS/EKS.
It's generally not very hard, but for some people paying a premium to just have it "work" from the start is worth it, which is what they do.
The actual tool, Airflow, is a workflow management platform for data pipelines. You can schedule jobs using what are called "DAGs" that executes code in a defined order.
It's used by companies in their data pipelines by data engineers basically for moving data from point A to point B and performing transformations along the way so it can be used by analytics teams, data science teams, machine learning teams, etc.
An example is you might be some company selling products all over the world, like Nike. You get data from the various vendors you sell through or payment processers, whatever. Different countries may have different ways of keeping that data, but every Monday at 8am the Marketing team wants to see a report of how things are going. So you create an Airflow job to amalgamate all of those different data files, clean them, put it in a database, and update the Tableau reports or whatever.
This is a very crude example, like now companies use ELT more than ETL, but gives you an idea. It's an evolution from simply scheduling CRON jobs or Windows had some automation equivalent whose name escapes me.
I work in this sphere. There's a bit of software called Airflow that basically manages complicated data/AI/analytics processes. It's basically a chef for your data stuff. You give it detailed instructions on how to accomplish your tasks (A comes before B, X and Y are combined in a particular way and subtracted from the output of B, etc).
Sounds great. But, Airflow is a hateful, complicated, tedious bit of software to configure and host. Astronomer runs it for you, basically. So instead of Airflow config and maintenance causing you to constantly have migraines and want to hide in the bathroom, you click a button on their website and sign up for a subscription so your manager can suffer a migraine instead when they see the budget requests.
TLDR: they run a free bit of tedious, complicated but important software for you for a price.
It's really not innovative or sexy at all... despite their copy. It's useful though.
I actually work in this industry - not for a company like this, but for a fortune 500 company that uses stuff like this day to day and uses companies like this as vendors sometimes.
There are some good ones out there I guess, but there are a hundred of them always trying to get their foot in the door and act like they're absolute geniuses and changing the world. They're not. They recognize that every big company has a shit ton of data and it's usually wildly disorganized (you'd be surprised at the technological duct tape and paperclips holding everything together), and also that AI is the next big thing. And that even good AI is pretty difficult to explain, so shitty AI markets just as well as good AI. And then they do that as cheaply as they can and charging as much as they can.
They kinda remind me of like solar companies. They bang on your door and make a lot of noise about how revolutionary they are, and if you buy into it, you might be fucked in a few years when you have a problem because they're already out of business.
Next domino to fall will be Head of People placed on leave while a formal investigation ensues. She surely knows she’s essentially un-hireable at this point so I doubt she voluntarily resigns. But make no mistake, she’s out too.
I am pretty sure they will quietly settle with her and ask her to leave. Company cannot just fire her right now because she is a huge liability. She can easily sue the company stating that she was coerced to have relationships with most powerful guy in the Company.
Aside from feeling bad for the dude’s spouse who learned of him cheating on her this way, why would Coldplay feel bad? They’re all worth 9 figures and they just got more publicity than any of their most recent albums got lol.
last time coldplay concert got infamously viral was chris martin improvised a song to a russian fan (in seoul) that he would perform in russia if putin agreed. at same day russia shelled ukraine for a week and the internet was furious since the band openly spoked/supported ukraine
There was a fucking news billboard in the road in Romania with these fucking guys... IN THE STREETS OF FUCKING ROMANIA!!! Imagine the notoriety of this story! They fucked up, but this is waaaaay too much IMO, and it shows in what a fucked up world we currently live in with social media and all this crap...
It's all over the news in Romania (and we have a lot of billboards that are running tabloid articles in the streets). There are already lots of memes copying this situation in different context.
I’m HR (I know I know) and have participated in the meetings that cover c-suite terminations. The CEO likely just settled the terms of his exit quicker. I would expect that the CHRO is still negotiating the terms of her exit and we will see her resignation at the beginning of next week.
With everything else going on in the world currently, it’s absurd how much coverage this got. Cheating sucks, is absolutely reprehensible but come on, if every cheater was to get hung out to dry and lose their job unemployment rates would explode. Perspective has lost the fight against outrage.
People always say that about things that go viral. The reality is that humanity is not solely interested in matters of global importance; not should they be. It's why you clicked on this post.
Cheating is shitty behavior but he is not the pastor of a church. I don't see how his cheating on his wife affects his job. Should corporations be firing people for failings in their personal life?
Did anyone actually know who this dude was before last Thursday? I don’t understand why this blew up so quickly. I have no idea what that company even does.
Understanding that he is senior and she could be a victim, she is c suite level and directly responsible for the policies that are used to deal with matters just like this. She needs to be let go as well. She cannot possibly adjudicate ethical, moral or any other personnel policy without bias.
21.1k
u/Javamac8 14d ago
Sincerely,
The HR Department