Coldplaygate is more than a PR disaster—it’s a cultural trigger. People are tired of tech bros preaching disruption while practicing hubris and deception.
By now, we’ve all seen the type: men who preach disruption but operate with hubris and deception. Take Adam Neumann’s cult-like WeWork chaos; Elon Musk’s manipulation of politics with an endless supply of money; Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire built on smoke and mirrors; Jeff Bezos’ predatory pricing to crush small competitors; Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook enabling disinformation; and Travis Kalanick’s work culture that was so toxic it sparked a global #DeleteUber campaign.
Enter “Coldplaygate,” the viral cheating scandal that unfolded on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. When Astronomer CEO Andy Byron was caught embracing his HR head Kristin Cabot (both of them married to other people), the internet lost its mind.
That cheating moment on July 15 went viral almost instantly. Today, only eight days later, the original video posted by Grace Springer, who was at the same concert, has racked up 126 million views—not counting the million others from thousands of reposts.
But it wasn’t just the ducking and hiding by Byron and Cabot that triggered the backlash—it was everything that hug represented: the hypocrisy, entitlement and delusion that tech bros can rewrite the rules of basic decency.
Byron and Cabot’s company is valued at $1.2 billion and had just secured $93 million in fresh funding in May. But their affair was just the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley sins that remind us why people love to hate tech bros.
And hate isn’t too strong a word.
In the early days, tech founders were treated like gods walking among us because they promised disruption that would make our lives better. But over time, that image curdled. We got tired of the self-proclaimed geniuses who disrupted everything except their own accountability.
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The tech bro archetype
Startup culture rewards boldness, sure. But when boldness is paired with entitlement, it results in recklessness, which is often disguised as authenticity, passion, or visionary leadership. Never mind the wreckage.
Byron, it turns out, has a beautiful wife and two kids. Cabot, whose job it is to safeguard the company’s ethics, is married to another CEO and they had just bought a mansion in February. Of all people Byron could have romanced in the office, the head of HR represented the worst conflict of interest.
It wasn’t just the ducking and hiding by Byron and Cabot that triggered the backlash—it was everything that hug represented: the hypocrisy, entitlement and delusion that tech bros can rewrite the rules of basic decency.
That’s what makes Coldplaygate more than just gossip. It embodies the erosion of boundaries in startup culture. When leadership and HR are tangled emotionally or romantically, the workplace rots from the inside out.
At the heart of this, we are so tired of this recurring theme: tech bros believing rules are for other people. They brag about disrupting regulation, outsmarting taxes, breaking things “fast”—but rarely about accountability.
But then, so what? Why did the internet care so much? Because we’ve seen this movie before. Because we’re exhausted from being told to worship founder culture and unicorn CEOs. Because we’ve seen workplace hierarchies become playgrounds for the entitled. Because we know that beyond an affair, it was hubris and hypocrisy that was being projected on the big screen…and there was no escaping it in the days that followed.
Until they shed that bro energy, the public outrage won’t go away.
