OnlyFans was a little-known U.K.-based company before porn entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky bought it in 2018. Now he’s a member of The Forbes 400.
Before 2018, very few people had ever heard of OnlyFans. At the time it was a two-year-old website launched by Tim Stokely, a U.K.-based entrepreneur in the adult content industry. His previous sites—GlamGirls and Customs4U—hadn’t taken off. But he had hopes for OnlyFans, a marketplace where creators could sell exclusive photos and videos to users. “Our thinking was always, ‘OK, what if you could build a platform where it’s exactly [the same] or very similar to existing on social media, but with the key difference being the payment button?” Stokely said in a 2021 interview with GQ magazine.
Though Stokely claims the site was never marketed to any specific industry, it soon gained traction as a personalized porn marketplace. In 2017, one year after he founded the company with his brother and father, a retired investment banker, there were around $3 million transactions recorded on OnlyFans. The next year, Stokely received an email from another porn entrepreneur, an American named Leonid Radvinsky who had some ideas for the website. “We were really, really impressed with his thoughts,” Stokely later told The Financial Times, noting that he “soon realized that we shared a similar vision for the platform.” In October that year, Radvinsky bought an at least 75% stake in the then nascent company for an unknown sum. One month later, he took over 100%, company records show.
This would prove a watershed moment for the business. In financial statements published earlier this month, Fenix International, the parent company of OnlyFans, revealed it made $485 million in profits on $1.3 billion in revenue in 2023. That’s up from $404 million on $1.1 billion in 2022. The platform counts more than 305 million global users who spent a combined $6.6 billion last year on subscriptions to their favorite creators. It costs anywhere from $4.99 to $49.99 to subscribe to a creator on OnlyFans (the website takes a 20% cut). Last month, OnlyFans ranked as the No. 65 most popular website in the U.S. before Xfinity, Yelp and Spotify, according to analytics platform Similarweb.
OnlyFans’ soaring popularity has unleashed a massive payday for Radvinsky. The 42-year-old billionaire made headlines last month after paying himself a whopping $472 million dividend last year, the equivalent of about $1.2 million a day. He’s siphoned more than $1 billion in cash from the business since 2021, according to the company’s financial statements. Thanks to these hefty dividend payments and the ballooning value of the overall business—now valued by Forbes at nearly $3 billion—Radvinsky debuts on The Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans this year with an estimated net worth of $3.8 billion. His fortune has nearly tripled since Forbes first named him a billionaire in 2022.
Yet despite the high profile nature of his business, very little is known about Radvinsky himself. He keeps a very low profile in Florida, where he lives, and doesn’t appear to have given a single press interview throughout his entire career. On what is believed to be his LinkedIn page, he is described as the president of Leo.com, “a venture capital fund that invests in technology companies” but makes no mention of OnlyFans. A website for the venture firm describes Radvinsky as a “respected e-commerce pioneer and experienced company-builder” and advertises that it will provide up to $1 million in funding per company. A link to a list of the firm’s investments doesn’t work.
Radvinsky may not tout it online but his fortune is firmly rooted in the porn business, dating back to his very first company, which he launched in 1999 at age 17—apparently running it out of his mother’s house in the Chicago suburbs. A previous Forbes investigation into the business, Cybertania Inc., detailed how a teenaged Radvinsky made millions through his business, a shady empire of websites advertising access to “illegal” and “hacked” passwords to porn sites.
At the time, porn was less readily available than it is today and Radvinsky appeared to earn money by charging porn sites for directing traffic their way. Some of Radvinsky’s websites purported to direct users to pornographic content involving underage children and bestiality.
However, Forbes’ 2021 investigation, which uncovered nearly a dozen of porn-linked domain names connected to Ravinsky (one report claims he owned hundreds), found no evidence that his sites actually linked to the illegal content they promised. (Though Radvinsky was the operator, his mother, Anna, was listed as the company’s president, secretary and director on a 2007 annual report.)
At the same time he was building his porn referral business, Radvinsky got a bachelor’s degree in economics at Northwestern University, graduating summa cum laude in 2003. On his LinkedIn profile, the porn mogul appears to list himself as the valedictorian of his Northwestern class, though a spokesperson for the university told Forbes this is not true. “Northwestern doesn’t rank its students,” the spokesperson said in an email.
About a year after graduation, Radvinsky was onto his next venture: building an adult camming website called MyFreeCams.com. The website was at one point described by sex industry publication XBIZ as “one of the world’s largest adult webcam communities.” By 2010, the publication reported, MyFreeCams.com had more than 100,000 “models” selling their services through the platform and more than five million customers.
Though there are no publicly available financials for that business specifically, it was clearly a boon for Radvinsky, who spent more than $10 million on at least six different lakefront apartment units in Chicago between 2008 and 2016. (It’s unclear whether Radvinsky still owns MyFreeCams.com. MFCXY Inc., the Illinois-based company Radvinsky started for the webcam site, dissolved in 2021, while a U.K. subsidiary of which Radvinsky was the director ceased operations in October 2023.)
Lee Taylor, chief financial officer of OnlyFans (left), and Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans (right).
© 2022 Bloomberg Finance LP
By the time he bought into OnlyFans in 2018, Radvinsky had two decades of experience as a successful porn entrepreneur. He never took a public-facing leadership role at the firm (he’s listed as a director of Fenix International, the parent company, for which his exact responsibilities aren’t clear). Initially Stokley stayed on as CEO.
But the business grew rapidly after Radvinsky became involved, jumping from 13 million subscribers in 2019 to 188 million in 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic played a prominent role as OnlyFans became a magnet for restless people looking for a way to make money from home. The platform was also helped by a string of celebrities—including rapper Cardi B and former Disney star Bella Thorne—joining as creators. Founder Tim Stokely credited the company’s referral program, which gives 5% of the earnings of any creator they are able to sign up.
Soon, though, there emerged a chasm between the site’s stated purpose and its actual usage. Stokely repeatedly played down OnlyFans’ focus on adult content. Then in August 2021, the company announced it would ban all sexually explicit content on the platform—Stokely blamed banks, which he said were refusing to take OnlyFans’ business.
The move sparked backlash and questions over how the platform would survive such a major pivot away from its core business. A few days after the initial announcement, the company suddenly reversed course, explaining it had “secured assurances necessary to support our divorce creator community.” Stokely stepped down as CEO that December and was replaced by Amrapali “Ami” Gan, a marketing executive at OnlyFans. Gan left the position in June 2023; Keily Blair, the company’s chief strategy and operations officer, and a trained lawyer, took her place.
Continuing to accommodate porn has helped make OnlyFans one of the U.K.’s most profitable tech companies. Counting just 42 full-time staffers, its profit per employee averages $15.7 million. But it’s also led to ongoing legal and ethical issues. A Reuters investigation published in March detailed nearly 140 instances in which men and women complained sexually explicit content had been posted without their consent. In May, the British media regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into OnlyFans’ age verification measures after the company revealed a “technical glitch” meant its minimum age threshold was set to 20 years old instead of 23.
Prior to joining OnlyFans in 2022, Blair, OnlyFans’ new CEO, worked as a data and privacy expert for the London-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where OnlyFans was a client. (OnlyFans’ chief legal officer Matt Reeder also came from the same law firm.) In a February interview Blair said she felt her background would help “reduce some of the risk that’s inherent in running a tech business, especially one that is open and honest about allowing adult content.” She said the company also continues to focus on expansion opportunities, including its YouTube-style video streaming platform OFTV (OnlyFans TV), which she said is looking into licensing its content to other streaming platforms.
“I want people to recognize the business for what it is, as an incredible U.K. tech success story,” Blair told The Financial Times. It is an incredible U.K. tech success story—with an American porn mogul, now one of the richest people in the U.S., at its heart.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
