Alexander James Ashburner Nix (born 1 May 1975) is 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 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. A member of a banking family with ties to colonial India, Nix attended Eton and studied art history; he is married to shipping heiress Olympia Paus. He started his career as a financial analyst with Baring Securities in Mexico before moving to the strategic communication industry and joining SCL Group. In 2013 he set up Cambridge Analytica, where he became CEO. 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 March 2018, Nix was suspended from Cambridge Analytica after undercover video footage showed him claiming his company was using honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, among other tactics, to influence more than 200 elections globally for his clients.