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Andy Bryon is resigning — in hilarious disgrace.
On Saturday, the Astronomer CEO stepped away permanently from his position after two people (strongly!) believed to be him and another member of his company’s executive team were involved in a viral moment at a recent Coldplay concert in Massachusetts.
For those whose Internet connection was out all week, here is a quick recap of what led to this decision…
During Coldplay’s aforementioned show a few days ago, a camera swung around and caught Byron hugging his HR boss, Kristin Cabot, from behind.
As the big screen focused on them, Byron quickly hid behind a barrier while Cabot covered her face with her hands. They were clearly embarrassed and in shock and seemingly very afraid of being seen acting in such a cozy manner.
“Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy!” said lead singer Chris Martin as the crowd laughed loudly… and videos of the awkward moment then spread quickly online.
Days later, Byron was placed on leave by Astronomer, which said it was conducting an investigation into his behavior.
Fast forward to July 19 and this statement from the company:
Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted. The Board will begin a search for our next Chief Executive as Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy continues to serve as interim CEO.
We try not to laugh often at the personal lives of individuals on this website — but Andy Byron is a millionaire who headed up a billion-dollar business…
… and has now been forced out of his position because he was captured on camera canoodling with his co-working sidepiece at a concert in front of thousands of people, and whose name never would have been known if he and said sidepiece had just acted all cool and normal when they saw themselves on screen.
It’s objectively an incredible turn of events.
“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding,” the company previously wrote on X in response to the scandal.
“Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability. The Board of Directors has initiated a formal investigation into this matter and we will have additional details to share very shortly.”
The DataOps platform also shut down speculation that Byron had previously spoken out in a fake written statement that began circulating the internet one day after the ordeal.
In the past 36 hours, more than 22,000 news articles were written about Astronomer and roughly 9,000 were written about Byron, according to Muck Rack data.
They say no publicity is bad publicity, but… well… is that really always the case?!?
In the wake of what certainly appears to be an instance of infidelity, Byron’s wife changed her last name on Facebook and then deleted her account.
Astronomer is the company behind Astro, “the industry-leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow,” per its company website.
It was estimated to be worth between $1.2 and $1.3 billion after its Series D funding round in May 2025.
