Amaryllis Fox
Amaryllis Fox
Amaryllis H. Fox is a writer and a peace activist. She is also the founder and CEO of Mulu, an affiliate marketing social media network that enables people to make product recommendations and direct a percentage of the revenue they make to a charity of their choosing.
Early Life & Education
Amaryllis Fox is born to an English actress/poet and an American economist/entrepreneur.
Her father’s work required a lot of traveling, which in effect caused Fox to spend most of her childhood in different parts of the world, including South East Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Former Soviet Union.
Before going to school, Amaryllis traveled to the Thai-Burmese border and worked as a volunteer in the Mai Laa refugee camp.
While there, she decided to postpone her college education and worked for the Burmese democracy movement; Fox told the group leader that she was going to stay in Thailand when her plan was boarding to go back to the United States.
She eventually got the chance to interview Aung San Suu Kyi for the BBC. The interview landed Amaryllis Fox in prison when she was 18 years old.
Based on this interaction, Amaryllis selected Oxford for her undergraduate studies.
She said during the opening of Netflix's Business of Drugs:
"I grew up all over the world because my dad was an economist who focused on developing economies.
I wound up doing my undergrad at Oxford University, focused on international law.
It was my last year there that 9/11 happened.
It completely shattered my universe."[37]
In 1999, Fox enrolled at Oxford to pursue international law.
She spent most of her time in Dili, East Tamor to work with Xanana Gusmão’s team and form IDPs in the world’s newest country. She also worked on the reconciliation process in Srebrenica, Bosnia to restore community trust, after the Bosnian genocide in 1995 that killed over 8,000 Muslims. She eventually graduated with honors.
In 2002, Fox started an international security graduate program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. There, she generated an algorithm to foretell terrorist activity under thesis advisor, Daniel Byman. After that, she was asked by the university’s CIA officer in residence to share her algorithm.
Fox said on Netflix's Business of Drugs about her course of study at Georgetown:
"I wanted to understand what caused [the 2001 attack], and how it could have happened.
I set about writing an algorithm that took historical data and processed it to predict the next attack.
It got the attention of the CIA and I worked with them for almost a decade as a field operative keeping WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] out of the hands of non-state actors, terror groups like Al-Qaeda and their affiliates around the world."[37]
Fox then started working as a political and terrorism analyst for SE Asia and went on to graduate with honors in 2004.[38]
Career
After graduating, Amaryllis Fox moved into the CIA's operational training program and worked as a Clandestine Service officer overseas until 2009.
After her government service ended, Fox used her coding abilities and combined it with her international experience to start an e-commerce firm called Mulu. The company supported at-risk communities all over the world.
In 2014, Fox was hired by Twitter to be a part of its global e-commerce business.
In December 2015, Amaryllis Fox quit her job and began writing full-time.
Amaryllis Fox became widely known in 2016 for a brave and truthful video interview with Al Jazeera (AJ+) about her experiences as a Central Intelligence Agency. The video went viral overnight and has since been viewed over 100 million times.
Amaryllis published her book, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA in 2019.[37]
In 2020, Fox became a host of Netflix's The Business of Drugs series. Each episode of the six-part series covers a type of drug - including cocaine, cannabis, opioids, synthetics, heroin, meth - its history, and its unrelenting presence around the world. By exploring the economics behind the substances, Amaryllis hopes to finally put an end to the War on Drugs, a battle that has been raging for nearly 50 years. [37]
Personal Life
Amaryllis Fox and Robert F. "Bobby" Kennedy III married in June 2018 at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. In January 2019, their child Bobby was born. Amaryllis also has a daughter Zoe from her previous marriage. Amaryllis' first husband was a fellow CIA agent named Dan.[37]