Alexander James Ashburner Nix is a British businessman and former political consultant, born into the Ashburner-Nix family of the English landed gentry. He was educated at Eton College and began his career as a financial analyst in Mexico City for Robert Fraser & Partners and Baring Securities before joining the SCL Group in 2003. There, he rose to lead the company's elections division, which provided data analytics and strategic communication services to political campaigns and governments worldwide. In 2013, Nix co-founded Cambridge Analytica as a U.S.-focused offshoot of SCL, backed by significant investment from American billionaire Robert Mercer and strategic guidance from Steve Bannon. As CEO, he became the public face of the data analytics industry’s most notorious scandal, where the firm harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users without consent to build psychographic profiles for data-driven voter targeting. His work included involvement with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, the campaign for Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, the UK's Brexit referendum, and other international efforts. Nix gained significant international notoriety due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which erupted in 2018 following an undercover exposé by Channel 4 News. The exposé captured him discussing unethical campaign tactics, including the use of 'honey traps' and bribery simulations to discredit political rivals, alongside allegations of the company's misuse of Facebook user data for political profiling and targeted advertising, as well as voter suppression tactics. The 2018 revelations triggered global outrage over privacy violations, leading to the company’s insolvency, Nix’s suspension and subsequent firing as CEO, and his testimony before parliamentary committees in both the UK and the US. He faced intense scrutiny and accusations of misleading lawmakers and permitting unethical practices. In 2020, Nix accepted a seven-year ban from serving as a UK company director for conduct deemed potentially unethical, though he denied breaking any laws. A 2024 court judgment later cleared him of breaching directors’ duties in handling regulatory scrutiny.