It was the awkward silence heard round the world on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street this week, as one of the show’s co-hosts may or may not have accidentally outed Apple CEO Tim Cook as gay on national television.

The hosts of the show were speaking with James R. Stewart, a New York Times columnist who recently wrote a piece examining corporate America’s ongoing stigma against homosexual CEOs. Stewart’s piece specifically profiled former BP CEO John Browne, who supposedly lived a “tortured life” trying to do the work of leading a Fortune 500 company as a gay man.

“What I find so surprising about this is that [Browne] becomes the first person ever at a Fortune 500 company to publicly acknowledge that he is gay,” Stewart said. “And after all the advances in gay civil rights, you would think CEOs especially are measured by objective criteria, which is financial performance.”

Browne went on to say that he knew of several other gay Fortune 500 CEOs, but that when he reached out to them in connection to his column profiling Browne, he got an “extremely cool reception.”

“No one would allow to be named at all,” he said.

Stewart’s statement was a clearly absolute one: that Browne is the first, and thus far only, major CEO who has acknowledged his homosexuality in the public eye. However, one of the CNBC co-hosts on the show could not quite take the hint.

“I think Tim Cook is fairly open about the fact he’s gay at the head of Apple, isn’t he,” the co host, named Simon Hobbs, asked?

What followed that comment was a long, awkward silence, leading to Stewart’s nervous and disappointed response of, “Hmm, no.”  Stewart tried to backtrack, saying that he was not willing to out anybody, and reiterating his earlier statement that no CEOs at major companies were willing to be named as gay, but the damage was done.

Of course, the media has speculated about Tim Cook’s sexuality before, and rumors have been circulating for quite some time that the Apple CEO might be gay, but rarely has anyone been so clearly and accidentally outed on national television. The worst part of the incident is that it clouded the other parts of the conversation, which showed that there is clearly something about modern American corporate culture that is prejudiced against homosexuality.