this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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It was on the jumbotron - surely one or two of the thousands of people at the show knew who it was. And then we'd have people watching it remotely, or the show appearing on video services, etc.
Assuming this was discovered via "Social Media Surveillance" is a leap, and a weak argument about such surveillance (which is a real problem that I've been arguing against since the late 90's).
Again, this was on the jumbotron. Stuff on the jumbotron has made the media circles since the advent of the jumbotron.
Their reaction is what set it all off too. Even the singer immediately speculates that they're having an affair because of how they acted. So yeah, even if he wasn't a billionaire, somebody probably would have doxxed him anyway because there are tons of people that like drama and know they can make money off it. That he is a billionaire and doing something deeply unethical is what makes the story go viral all over social media. Lots and lots of people there want to make money and clout by exploiting any avenue for drama and engagement.
Perhaps the problems this exposes are not just our grim and omnipresent surveillance apparatus, but the attached system of gig-economy content creators all racing to the lowest common denominator for scraps of engagement and ad revenue? We've created a society of unempathetic monsters.
Is there a reliable source that he is a billionaire? I haven't seen that in any reporting. "Billionaire" is a four letter word around these parts, I would be careful about throwing the label around without solid evidence.
This I think is the real story. This isn't necessarily about our surveillance state, but more that we are constantly observed by the world and it is a specific type of hell that we cannot escape. The fact that this makes adultery more difficult is a bittersweet benefit, I guess, but there are no guardrails on this sort of thing. If this was in any other context besides a cheating CEO this would all be supremely fucked up, and that's why I think this is an article worth talking about.
Half-assed Google search suggests he's worth somewhere between 20 and 70 million.
Astronomer as a company is worth around a billion.
Sounds believeable, but I will point out that a google search alone is not a reliable source, so we still truly do not know and we shouldn't be making statements like this without reliable sources. Page one of a google search is just all the publications that paid google the most money to be on page one. IME, most of those are trash-tier AI-gen articles.