Alexander Nix

Alexander James Ashburner Nix (born 1 May 1975) is a British businessman, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica and a former director of the Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group, a behavioural research and strategic communications consultancy, leading its elections division (SCL Elections). Cambridge Analytica and its parent SCL were involved in psychological warfare operations for the British military and involved in influencing hundreds of elections globally; Cambridge Analytica helped Leave.EU with its Brexit campaign, according to both Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica staff. The company was also engaged by the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns during the 2016 US presidential election. The company also ran Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta's campaign. A member of the Ashburner-Nix family of Crawley, Nix grew up in Notting Hill, attended Eton and studied art history. 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; Nix's father was also a co-owner of SCL. In 2013 he became CEO of SCL's new subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. The men behind Cambridge Analytica and its parent SCL were described as having close ties to the Conservative Party (UK), the British royal family and the British military, and included some of the Conservative Party's largest donors, and former Conservative minister Jonathan Marland, Baron Marland. The company provided advice to the Foreign Office and Nix met with Boris Johnson in 2016. Both in the UK and the US campaigns, Cambridge Analytica used private information from over 87 million Facebook users harvested from their profiles without permission. In 2018 Cambridge Analytica was dissolved after undercover video footage showed 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. In 2019 Nix and his colleague Aleksandr Kogan settled with the Federal Trade Commission, agreeing to delete previously obtained data; in 2020, Nix agreed to a disqualification undertaking prohibiting him from running U.K.