Summer lovin’, put on blast: Can CEOs stop behaving badly?

Tell me more, tell me more

What would Bernie say?

Ian Chaffee is a technology and startup media relations consultant based in Los Angeles.

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

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

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,

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.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their