[7] 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.

[12][13] Alexander James Ashburner Nix was born on 1 May 1975 to a banking family that belonged to the English landed gentry and had close ties to British colonial history both in the West Indies and British India, the Ashburner-Nix family of Crawley and London; Nix is mainly of English descent, and has some Black Jamaican ancestry in the 19th century as well as ancestors born in India and Peru.

[18] He started his career as a financial analyst with Baring Securities in Mexico City[19] for Robert Fraser & Partners LLP, a tax and corporate finance firm.

In 2013, 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".

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.

[32] Christopher Wylie described Nix as "born in the wrong century" and "the type of person that would have been ideal at the height of the British Empire to go and become a governor of a colony, because he's the right station and class and went to Eton and all that.

"[33] On 8 October 2018, The Guardian reported that Nix referred to Mia Mottley, the elected Prime Minister of Barbados, and other government figures via the racial slur of "Niggers" in email communications.

[34] On 23 January 2018, Nix was appointed director of Emerdata Ltd.,[35] a new company incorporated in August 2017, along with SCL chairman Julian Wheatland and Cambridge Analytica chief data officer Alexander Tayler.

[21] Another director of Emerdata is Chinese businessman Johnson Chun Shun Ko [zh], deputy chairman and executive director[36] of Frontier Services Group, a private security firm which mostly operates in Africa and is chaired by US businessman and strong Trump supporter Erik Prince, who is best known for founding private military group Blackwater USA and being the brother of US education secretary Betsy DeVos.

Effective from 5 October 2020, Alexander Nix is disqualified for seven years from acting as a director or directly or indirectly becoming involved, without the permission of the court, in the promotion, formation or management of a UK company.

[13] Nix has been compared to "a Bond villain" with "the sinister-sounding surname, the cut-glass accent and his position at the centre of a conspiracy theory involving Brexit, Trump and dodgy data.