The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson

The Coldplay Concert Scandal That Took Down a CEO

• Molly McPherson • Episode 321

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Seventy thousand five hundred twenty-one. 

That’s how many news stories included Andy Byron’s name after one juicy Jumbotron moment at a Coldplay concert. In this episode of The PR Breakdown, dissecting how a viral moment spiraled into a corporate PR disaster that exposed a CEO, an HR chief, and a total breakdown in communication control.

What made this story explode? Not just the video, but the silence that followed a hoax. 

Molly breaks down the viral ingredients:

  • A real-life HR entanglement caught on camera
  • Fake apologies and fake wife statements
  • A tech company scrambling to fact-check a fake statement
  • And a resignation that came too late to stop the damage

It’s a live case study in digital PR failure, and a warning for anyone who thinks “it will pass" is a good crisis response strategy in 2025.

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Molly McPherson:

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 Coldplay 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 ParityX account named Peter Ennis. You are not alone. Welcome to the PR Breakdown.

Molly McPherson:

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. 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. 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 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, kristen 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.

Molly McPherson:

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, 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 Howard 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 Knudelers both work for Now. Thankfully, this viral crisis was not known as Cold Playgate, 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.

Molly McPherson:

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.

Molly McPherson:

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 a privately held company backed by private equity. There are no shareholders in there, but they did have a board and they needed to make a decision right away. 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 stakeholders. There needs to be a public statement because people want to know what's happening.

Molly McPherson:

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 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.

Molly McPherson:

I had a dentist appointment in the early afternoon. I had to get Novocaine and because I'm a baby, at the dental office my dentist 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.

Molly McPherson:

But a reason why I get these media outlets, why I couldn't do a press statement as well, is because I had a hair appointment and 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? It actually pertains to the story. If you listened 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?

Molly McPherson:

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 whoop, they all jumped in so we were having a great conversation. It was fun.

Molly McPherson:

Then my stylist says to me Jess 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 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 I have to immediately tell my Substack community what was going on. 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.

Molly McPherson:

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 said 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 Knudler's siblings, wedding the weekend before and 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.

Molly McPherson:

Thanks to Angie she's a member of my Substack community. She sent a link to Men's Health Magazine, I think it was, with a response to the fake CEO post about Andy Byard. 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.

Molly McPherson:

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 from me as well, and I went. I don't want to do that, but 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.

Molly McPherson:

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.

Molly McPherson:

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 Coldplay's 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.

Molly McPherson:

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 M-dash more than me. It's my favorite punctuation. But ChatGPT does use M-dashes a lot and I don't write in M-dashes anymore. I used to love M-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.

Molly McPherson:

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.

Molly McPherson:

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?

Molly McPherson:

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.

Molly McPherson:

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 M-dash, let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world M-dash 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 Kristen Cabot. She's still employed at Astronomer.

Molly McPherson:

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.

Molly McPherson:

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. 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.

Molly McPherson:

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.

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