Astronomer HR Kristin Cabot’s viral moment revives Boston Brahmin talk: Here are notable figures from this old elite class

A Coldplay concert turned into a PR disaster last week when cameras zoomed in on Astronomer CEO Andy Byron sharing a close moment with Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of human resources. Both are married, just not to each other, and the footage quickly spiraled into viral infamy.


While online chatter has largely centered on the workplace dynamic and questions of ethics, attention has also shifted to Cabot’s powerful lineage. Her marriage into the Cabot family, one of Boston’s most historically significant names, has sparked renewed interest in the rarely discussed social group known as the Boston Brahmins.

The term Boston Brahmin was coined in 1861 by author Oliver Wendell Holmes in his novel Elsie Venner, drawing a comparison between Boston’s aristocracy and India’s highest caste, the Brahmins. Though the term was only metaphorical, it stuck, and came to represent a very real group of American elites: wealthy, Protestant, white families descended from early Puritan settlers.


According to PBS and the New England Historical Society, these families gained wealth through industries like shipping, trade, and manufacturing, and were known for their commitment to education, philanthropy, civic duty, and social exclusivity.

A long-standing Boston rhyme captures their exclusivity:

“And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.”

Kristin Cabot is married to Andrew Cabot, a sixth-generation descendant of the famed Cabot family and current owner of Privateer Rum. The Cabots are one of the few families widely regarded as part of the original First Families of Boston.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. – physician, writer and Harvard dean – was himself a Boston Brahmin. In fact, he coined the term “Boston Brahmin” in his 1861 novel Elsie Venner. A Cambridge-born Unitarian from Boston’s old aristocracy, Holmes described the city’s “Brahmin Caste” as destined to build a “shining city on a hill”.

A leading Transcendentalist, Emerson was a philosopher, poet, and essayist who boldly introduced Eastern philosophy to America—his poem “Brahma” references Hindu concepts. Born into Boston’s Brahmin elite (his father was a Unitarian minister), Emerson graduated from Harvard and uplifted American letters through lectures and abolitionist writings

James Russell Lowell was a Harvard professor, poet, editor and diplomat from Boston’s storied Lowell family. He is named alongside Longfellow and Holmes as one of the “most important Boston Brahmin poets”. . A member of the Brahmin aristocracy, Lowell edited The Atlantic Monthly and served as U.S. ambassador.

Born into the prominent Eliot Brahmin clan, Eliot was educated at Harvard before settling in England. He wrote landmark modernist poems like The Waste Land, won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1948), and worked as a publisher and literary critic.

Senator and diplomat John F. Kerry is often noted as a modern example of Brahmin heritage. The New England Historical Society calls him “a classic example of Brahmin by marriage” because his mother was from Boston’s Forbes family. The Forbes clan made early fortunes in trade and finance and was long part of Boston’s Brahmin class.

The sixth U.S. President (1825–1829) and son of John Adams, he was raised in Boston’s Brahmin aristocracy. A skilled diplomat, he helped shape the Monroe Doctrine, negotiated Florida’s acquisition, then served in Congress opposing slavery and defending the Amistad captives.

A foundational statesman from the Adams Brahmin line, he was a key advocate for independence, served as the second U.S. President (1797–1801), co-authored the Massachusetts Constitution, and acted as America’s first minister to Britain.