Viewpoint: ‘Coldplaygate’ united the internet against a common enemy – the rich tech bro

SINGAPORE – “Coldplaygate” has everything we love about internet drama.

It is painful for the people involved, but not tragic. It records a moment of comeuppance, the part in the show when justice rolls up to slap cheaters in the face. And it is all happening to the villain of the hour: the wealthy tech bro.

As more details about the conscious uncoupling captured on

British rock band Coldplay’s concert “kiss cam”

on July 16 emerged on social media, the show got juicier.

The pair, married to other people, gave us a moment of sitcom pleasure. There was the slow realisation that they were on camera, followed by the cartoon scramble to hide their face or hunch over, like three-year-olds who believe that if they can’t see us, we can’t see them.

A few hours later came the revelations that would spawn a thousand memes.

The man is Mr Andy Byron, chief executive of US tech firm Astronomer. The woman he was caught canoodling with on the jumbotron is Ms Kristin Cabot, his company’s chief people officer, whose job is to tell employees not to do what they are doing.

In any event, their moment of infamy proved a more valuable teaching tool than a hundred PowerPoint slides.  

Mr Byron is – or rather, was – the head of a unicorn company, a start-up valued at more than US$1 billion (S$1.28 billion) that is privately owned.

In short, he is rich, but not just rich. He is Silicon Valley rich, which is the specific kind of rich many of us despise, and not without good reason. 

Artificial intelligence is wrecking schools. Deepfakes are wrecking reputations. Robots will replace us. Men are spending billions making pointy space arrows rather than fixing a polluted Earth.

American pop star Katy Perry made the world cringe

when she kissed the ground

like she had been in orbit for months after tech billionaire Jeff Bezos turned her into a space tourist for a few seconds. 

It is not for nothing that in recent movies, the villains of the moment are tech moguls. In Superman, arch-villain Lex Luthor employs a crew to smear the Man of Steel’s reputation on social media. To make Luthor even more unlikable, writer-director James Gunn makes the disinformation army a bunch of monkeys – literal simians, smashing keyboards. This is what we experts in communications call “commentary”.

Luthor, like the tech-overlord villains in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Jurassic World Dominion (2022), Leave The World Behind (2023) and Civil War (2024), is an angry nerd with hands on the levers of public opinion.

The TED-Talk techno-optimism of the early 2000s has been swamped by a tide of crypto-fuelled cynicism. For every good thing TikTok brings – such as the sight of a middle-aged millionaire acting like a randy teen – it brings a slew of side effects.

Hollywood is responding to the times. In the 1980s, the baddies were Japanese executives, engorged with American money (Die Hard, 1988; Black Rain, 1989). The 1990s cast the spotlight on the serial killer and the psychopath (The Silence Of The Lambs, 1991; Se7en, 1995) and the 2000s gave us the drug cartel and the religious terrorist (television series 24, 2001 to 2014; Sicario, 2015).

Fast forward to today and the tech bro is Hollywood shorthand for “Here’s someone you can hate on sight; no tedious backstory needed”.

There is no word yet for the flowering of meme creativity that follows internet drama. For now, let’s call it the meme-naissance, and this one has spawned hilarious follow-ups.

Creators made instructional skits showing how the Coldplaygate cheaters could have passed off their snuggling as performing the Heimlich manoeuvre or a session of gongfu training.

Social media managers told their sports mascots to mimic the jumbotron moment at their stadiums. Even as you read this, the meme-naissance rolls on, racking up millions of views on TikTok. 

And guess who owns every social media platform now hosting memes about the most-talked-about tech bro of 2025 so far? That’s right – other tech bros. This is the circle of life.