This article's lead section may be too long.(October 2020) |
Alexander Nix | |
---|---|
Born | Alexander James Ashburner Nix 1 May 1975 |
Nationality | British |
Education | Eton College |
Alma mater | University of Manchester |
Occupation(s) | Director (formerly), Emerdata Director (formerly), SCL Group CEO (formerly), Cambridge Analytica |
Spouse | Olympia Paus |
Family | Nix family |
Alexander James Ashburner Nix (born 1 May 1975) is a British businessman, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica [1] and a former director of the Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group, [2] 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. [3]
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. [4] The company provided advice to the Foreign Office and Nix met with Boris Johnson in 2016. [5] [6]
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. [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. [8] [9] [10] In 2019 Nix and his colleague Aleksandr Kogan settled with the Federal Trade Commission, agreeing to delete previously obtained data; [11] in 2020, Nix agreed to a disqualification undertaking prohibiting him from running U.K. limited companies for seven years after permitting companies to offer potentially unethical services, while denying any wrongdoing. [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. [14] [15] His father Paul David Ashburner Nix (1944–2006 [16] ) was an investment manager who spent twenty-seven years with the M&G Group before joining Consulta in 1995, and was a shareholder of SCL Group.
Alexander Nix grew up in Notting Hill, in West London, attended Eton College, and studied art history at the University of Manchester. [17] During his 20s and 30s, he worked in Mexico and London. [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. [20] In 2003, Nix left finance to work in the strategic communication industry with the SCL Group.
In 2010 Nix married Olympia Paus, a wealthy Norwegian shipping heiress.
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". [20] The company ran Uhuru Kenyatta's presidential campaign in Kenya. [3] In the United States, it was involved in the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 presidential primaries and election, during which it received funding from the Mercer family. 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. [21] [22]
In an exposé of the company, Nix was filmed stating that "we are not only the largest and most significant political consultancy in the world, but we have the most established track record. We're used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows" and offered a "secretive relationship." [23]
Before the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Nix's firm was involved in supporting Leave.EU with its Brexit campaign, according to both Arron Banks of Leave.EU, former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's business development director Brittany Kaiser, and Leave.EU's communications director Andy Wigmore. [24] [25] [26]
During Boris Johnson's tenure as foreign secretary, the Foreign Office sought advice from Cambridge Analytica [5] and Boris Johnson had a meeting with Alexander Nix in 2016. [6]
According to Wigmore, the work for Leave.EU was done pro bono , without any money changing hand: "Because Nigel [Farage] is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, 'Here's this company we think may be useful to you.' What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn't you?" Behind Trump's campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were "the same people. It's the same family." [25]
In February 2018, Nix told the British parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that his company had not received data from Facebook; [26] following further media reports the committee's chairman, Damian Collins, said "We will be contacting Alexander Nix next week asking him to explain his comments." [27] Nix denies deliberately misleading the parliamentary Select Committee. [28]
In March 2018, The Observer reported that 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. [27] Nix offered "beautiful Ukrainian girls" to discredit political opponents in Sri Lanka. [29] The secret filming was screened on 19 March as part of a 30-minute segment, with a follow-up scheduled for the next day, focusing on its involvement in the Trump campaign. The conversation appears to portray Nix including entrapment and bribery as potential Cambridge Analytica services. [30]
On 20 March 2018, Nix was suspended from Cambridge Analytica. [9]
On 11 April 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the CEO position at Cambridge Analytica, saying Nix "has officially resigned from his position, according to a person close to the company", but also that a "company spokesman ... denied that Mr. Nix had submitted his resignation". [31]
On 2 May 2018, Cambridge Analytica announced they were "closing and starting insolvency proceedings". [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. On 16 March 2018, Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer were also appointed directors, [35] members of the Mercer family which backed Cambridge Analytica financially (by at least $15 million, according to the New York Times). [21] Another director of Emerdata is Chinese businessman Johnson Chun Shun Ko , 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. [37] On 13 April 2018, Nix's role of director was terminated. [35]
In 2019 Nix and his colleague Aleksandr Kogan settled with the Federal Trade Commission, agreeing to delete previously obtained data. [11]
In 2020 Nix signed a disqualification undertaking, accepted by the UK Secretary of State on 14 September 2020. [38] The Insolvency Service commented that "Within the undertaking, Alexander Nix did not dispute that he caused or permitted SCL Elections Ltd or associated companies to market themselves as offering potentially unethical services to prospective clients; demonstrating a lack of commercial probity." The unethical services offered included "bribery or honey trap stings, voter disengagement campaigns, obtaining information to discredit political opponents and spreading information anonymously in political campaigns." 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. [39] [40] Nix said he had made "no admission of wrongdoing" or broken any laws. [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." [41] [42] [43]
Nix is to be portrayed by Paul Bettany in an upcoming film on the Cambridge Analytica affair produced by the Russo brothers. [44]
Vagit Yusufovich Alekperov is a Russian–Azerbaijani businessman. He was the President of the oil company Lukoil from 1993 until 2022. As of 16 April 2021, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index by Bloomberg L.P., Alekperov has an estimated net worth of US$19.6 billion, making him the ninety-fourth wealthiest person in the world and the fifth in Russia. Alekperov previously owned a 36.8% stake in football club Spartak Moscow. Fellow former Spartak owner Leonid Fedun is Alekperov's close associate. Alekperov also owned superyacht builder Heesen Yachts until 2022.
Carole Jane Cadwalladr is a British author, investigative journalist, and features writer. She is a features writer for The Observer and formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph. Cadwalladr rose to international prominence in 2018 for her role in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, for which she was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, alongside The New York Times reporters.
Robert Leroy Mercer is an American hedge fund manager, computer scientist, and political donor. Mercer was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer and is the former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.
SCL Group was a private British behavioural research and strategic communication company that came to prominence through the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal involving its subsidiaries Cambridge Analytica and Crow Business Solutions MENA. It was founded in 1990 by Nigel Oakes, who served as its CEO. The company described itself as a "global election management agency". The company's leaders and owners had close ties to the Conservative Party, the British royal family, British military, United States Department of Defense and NATO and its investors included some of the largest donors to the Conservative Party.
Cambridge Analytica Ltd. (CA), previously known as SCL USA, was a British political consulting firm that came to prominence through the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It was started in 2013, as a subsidiary of the private intelligence company and self-described "global election management agency" SCL Group by long-time SCL executives Nigel Oakes, Alexander Nix and Alexander Oakes, with Nix as CEO. The well-connected founders had contact with, among others, the British Conservative Party, royal family, and military. The firm maintained offices in London, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The company closed operations in 2018 in the course of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, although firms related to both Cambridge Analytica and its parent firm SCL still exist.
Rebekah Mercer is an American heiress and Republican political donor, and director of the Mercer Family Foundation.
Russian interference in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum is a debated subject and remains unproven, though multiple sources argue evidence exists demonstrating that the Russian government attempted to influence British public opinion in favour of leaving the European Union. Investigations into this subject have been undertaken by the UK Electoral Commission, the UK Parliament's Culture Select Committee and Intelligence and Security Committee, and the United States Senate. "The Russia Report" published by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament in July 2020 did not specifically address the Brexit campaign, but it concluded that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace. It also found substantial evidence that there had been interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
Christopher Wylie is a British-Canadian data consultant. He is noted as the whistleblower who released a cache of documents to The Guardian he obtained while he worked at Cambridge Analytica. This prompted the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which triggered multiple government investigations and raised wider concerns about privacy, the unchecked power of Big Tech, and Western democracy's vulnerability to disinformation. Wylie was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018. He appeared in the 2019 documentary The Great Hack. He is the head of insight and emerging technologies at H&M.
Nigel John Oakes is a British businessman, and the founder and CEO of Behavioural Dynamics Institute and SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and her sister AggregateIQ; the companies became known to a wider audience as a result of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal involving the misuse of data. From the early 1990s, Oakes' companies, operating under succession of names, were involved in influencing elections in developing countries, and with the onset of the War on Terror they were also contracted by the British military. Oakes first became known as the boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor in the 1980s.
Aleksandr Kogan is a Moldovan-born American scientist, who is known for his research on the link between oxytocin and kindness, and for having developed the app that allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect personal details of 30 million Facebook users. He worked as a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge from 2012-2018 and is currently a technology entrepreneur.
In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.
AggregateIQ (AIQ) previously known as SCL Canada is a Canadian political consultancy and technology company, based in Victoria, British Columbia.
The Nix and Ashburner Nix family, of London and Crawley, is an English banking family that became part of the landed gentry in the 19th century, with their family estate Tilgate House in Crawley. Members have been notable as bankers in the City of London, notably as partners in the London bank Fuller, Banbury, Nix & Co, and as large estate owners in Crawley and public officials in Sussex, where John Ashburner Nix served as High Sheriff in 1911. The family had ties to British colonial history, especially Colonial India in the 19th century, and inherited a significant part of their wealth from George Ashburner, a businessman born in India. More recently, family member Alexander Nix became known as CEO of Cambridge Analytica. The family is included as "Nix of Tilgate" in Burke's Landed Gentry.
Several allegations of unlawful campaigning in the 2016 EU referendum have been made. Some allegations were dismissed by the investigating bodies, but in other cases wrongdoing was established, leading to the imposition of penalties. Sanctions have included the levying of the maximum fine possible on Facebook for breaches of data privacy.
Alexandra Lesley Phillips is a British journalist and former politician.
The Great Hack is a 2019 documentary film about the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, both previous documentary Academy Award nominees. The film's music was composed by Emmy-nominated film composer Gil Talmi. The Great Hack premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in the Documentary Premieres section and was released by Netflix on July 24, 2019.
Brittany Nicole Kaiser is the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica, which collapsed after details of its misuse of Facebook data became public. Cambridge Analytica potentially impacted voting in the UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kaiser testified about her involvement in the work of Cambridge Analytica before a select committee of the UK Parliament and to the Mueller investigation.
Emerdata Limited is a political consulting company based in London, formed in 2017 after filing for insolvency of Cambridge Analytica. Emerdata is accused by privacy advocates as its rebranded form and is headed by several of its executives.
Alexander Waddington Oakes is a British businessman, and the co-founder and an executive of Behavioural Dynamics Institute and SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and her sister AggregateIQ; the companies became known to a wider audience as a result of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal involving the misuse of data. From the early 1990s, Oakes' companies, operating under succession of names, were involved in influencing elections in developing countries, and with the onset of the War on Terror they were also contracted by the British military.
Emma L. Briant is a British scholar and academic researcher on media, contemporary propaganda, surveillance and information warfare who was involved in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal concerning data misuse and disinformation. She became Associate Professor of News and Political Communication at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia in 2023. Before this she was an associate researcher at Bard College and taught in the School of Communication at American University. Briant became an honorary associate in Cambridge University Center for Financial Reporting & Accountability, headed by Alan Jagolinzer, and joined Central European University, as a Fellow in the Center for Media, Data and Society in 2022.
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