Summer is usually the time of long days and longer vacations, but summer 2025 was a season where the business world’s inviolable godhead, the chief executive officer, looked less and less like a position worth exalting. The CEO became more like a chief excess officer.
Just this week, Nestlé CEO Laurent Freixe stepped down after he failed to disclose an ongoing romantic relationship with a direct subordinate after a tip to a company hotline. The primary instinct in this situation—as seems to be the reflexive instinct for the CEO class—was to deny, deny, deny. That was until additional tips to the company’s hotline led to an investigation and Freixe’s ouster.
More famously, there was the case of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, caught with his chief people officer on a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert. For purposes of PR, the dead of summer is the absolute worst time to be caught in flagrante mylo xyloto with your “work wife” instead of your real one. These are slow days for the attention economy, when people have plenty of time to memeify the worst day of your life. Astronomer’s response was to produce a viral video with Gwyneth Paltrow (the “consciously uncoupled” ex of Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin), which got some traction with the Us Weekly set, but did nothing to reassure Astronomer’s investors and users, let alone repair Astronomer’s prospects in the marketplace or as a brand.
Tell me more, tell me more
The CEO Summer of Love may have officially kicked off with the termination of Kohl’s CEO Ashley Buchanan in May after it was discovered he was steering business to someone with whom he was having a relationship. Kohl’s had previously been best known for its business model of converting Amazon returns into 20% off coupons for nothing you want to buy.
Three makes a trend. (Let’s not even get started on the case of the Polish paving company CEO who stole that shirt from the kid at the US Open.) While shares of publicly traded Kohl’s and Nestlé have been fine in the wake of these scandals, they create a diminishment of public trust. If nothing else, it is a distraction that consumes much time and money.
Is it that CEOs are behaving more poorly or just that we just have greater means to catch them in the act?
Perhaps it’s a bit of both. The internet and mobile phones have certainly given us the power to collectively shame someone at the speed of data. But, also, maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that the modern CEO is getting so bored that he starts acting like the chief entitlement officer (and it’s possibly worth noting that these are all “hes”). Or that when CEOs start getting praised and paid like “rock stars,” it’s only natural that they’ll start acting like them (if they’re not swaying with their C-Suite bestie at a rock star’s concert).
According to Economic Policy Institute data, the pay for chief executives at major companies in the U.S. rose by 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, with salaries averaging $22.21 million. Over the same period of time, the average worker’s earnings rose by 24%. In 2023, CEOs earned 290 times the salary of the average worker. CEOs don’t even have to be good at their job to enjoy several millions in severance or stock payouts. In the wake of Wells Fargo’s fake accounts scandal, where employees had created millions of fake accounts to meet sales goals, CEO John Stumpf walked away with just over $160 million in total salary, stock and pension.
What would Bernie say?
The recent rash of CEOs Gone Wild is arguably even stupider than commonplace fraud, and a troubling sign that there continues to be a slippery slope of accountability for C-Suite leadership. Sen. Bernie Sanders has previously proposed legislation that would raise taxes on companies with exorbitantly high CEO pay, but that’s Bernie Sanders and the voters last November made it clear they actually want the country led like a corporation, by the wildest CEO of all if possible.
This might also have something to do with the fact that only about 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Of course, greater diversity in the C-Suite that reflects the greater population as a whole (something that may be considered “woke” in some corners) is not all that popular this season either.
Or maybe we finally have the role AI was born to play. We go back to thinking and creating, and we leave it to the AI to figure out the best and fastest way to return value to shareholders infinitely times faster than just another guy in a Patagonia fleece vest. Cold, calculating, honey-tongued and libido-free, with only the occasional lie or hallucination. At least we know it can keep its hands to itself because it doesn’t have hands.
I wouldn’t bet any amount of money on these outcomes, though. Expect more executive tomfoolery and more payouts, but with possibly fewer “sweetheart” deals and many fewer Coldplay concerts.
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