1. Alexander James Ashburner Nix was born on 1 May 1975 and is a British businessman, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica and a former director of the Strategic Communication Laboratories Group, a behavioural research and strategic communications consultancy, leading its elections division.
Alexander Nix was engaged by the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns during the 2016 US presidential election.
Alexander Nix started his career as a financial analyst with Baring Securities in Mexico before moving to the strategic communication industry and joining SCL Group, a private intelligence company active in the military and political arenas founded by Nigel Oakes and whose president was former Conservative minister Sir Geoffrey Pattie; Alexander Nix's father was a co-owner of SCL.
Alexander Nix provided advice to the Foreign Office and Nix met with Boris Johnson in 2016.
In 2018 Cambridge Analytica was dissolved after undercover video footage showed Alexander Nix claiming his company was using honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, among other tactics, to influence more than 200 elections globally for his clients.
Alexander Nix grew up in Notting Hill, in West London, attended Eton College, and studied art history at the University of Manchester.
In 2003, Alexander Nix left finance to work in the strategic communication industry with the SCL Group.
In 2010 Alexander Nix married Olympia Paus, a wealthy Norwegian shipping heiress.
In 2013, Alexander Nix set up Cambridge Analytica as an offshoot of the SCL Group, to target voters in "more than 40 political campaigns in the US, Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia".
Alexander Nix's firm supported both the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns for the US presidency by using "psychographic" profiles of voters built on data harvested from Facebook.
In March 2018, The Observer reported that Alexander Nix talked "unguardedly about the company's practices" when he was secretly filmed by Channel 4 News reporters posing as prospective clients and that Cambridge Analytica was trying to stop the broadcast of the resulting programme.
Alexander Nix offered "beautiful Ukrainian girls" to discredit political opponents in Sri Lanka.
The conversation appears to portray Alexander Nix including entrapment and bribery as potential Cambridge Analytica services.
On 20 March 2018, Alexander Nix was suspended from Cambridge Analytica.
On 8 October 2018, The Guardian reported that Alexander Nix referred to Mia Mottley, the elected Prime Minister of Barbados, and other government figures via the racial slur of "Niggers" in email communications.
On 23 January 2018, Alexander Nix was appointed director of Emerdata Ltd.
In 2020 Alexander Nix signed a disqualification undertaking, accepted by the UK Secretary of State on 14 September 2020.
Alexander Nix said he had made "no admission of wrongdoing" or broken any laws.
Alexander Nix is to be portrayed by Paul Bettany in an upcoming film on the Cambridge Analytica affair produced by the Russo brothers.