Leonid Radvinsky owns the OnlyFans porn empire; get to know – 08/28/2023 – Market

Profits from the OnlyFans platform soared last year and news that its owner has earned more than $300 million (R$1.5 billion) in dividends has renewed curiosity about the porn mogul.

Leonid Radvinsky is a 41-year-old Ukrainian-American businessman with an estimated net worth of $2.1 billion.

He bought the company in 2018 from the British father and son team, Guy and Tim Stokely, who had started it two years earlier with an investment of £10,000.

On OnlyFans, users exhibit themselves in ways that range from simple sensual photos to explicit sex scenes. They earn by selling exclusive materials or gaining subscribers —payments are in dollars. Creators keep 80% of the values, and OnlyFans, 20%.

Radvinsky is believed to have paid millions of pounds for the deal. But who is he and where does his fortune come from?

What is known about Leonid Radvinsky?

To tell you the truth, very little. Despite the premise of the platform he owns, Radvinsky chooses to keep his personal life private. He hasn’t given many interviews to date.

However, despite an apparent aversion to publicity, there are clues to his life in a LinkedIn profile and on a personal website.

According to his LinkedIn, Radvinsky is a venture capitalist, philanthropist and technology entrepreneur who has “a special interest in emerging social media platforms”.

On his own website, Radvinsky says he has spent the last two decades “building software companies and contributing to the open source movement”.

Born in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, Radvinsky donated to relief efforts in Ukraine using cryptocurrency, and the value in real terms of the donation in 2022 reached more than $1.3 million, according to the cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk.

Radvinsky says he donates “an enormous amount of time, effort, and money to non-profit causes” like charities and tech ventures.

Outside of programming and philanthropy, he “is an avid reader who is always up for a game of chess and is an aspiring helicopter pilot,” says his website.

Where he lives?

His family moved to the United States when he was a child and settled in Chicago, British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported.

He now lives in Florida, but it is not known exactly where.

The billionaire is described by Forbes as a married man, but the BBC was unable to confirm the identity of his partner.

business history

OnlyFans is not Radvinsky’s first business linked to the porn industry.

The investor studied economics at Northwestern University, near Chicago, Illinois, and graduated in 2002. Since then, he has immersed himself in several projects.

Before becoming the sole shareholder of Fenix, the parent company of OnlyFans, he founded a website referral service called Cybertania —referral services are internet addresses used to take a visitor to another website.

According to Forbes, the service has offered users links to passwords for content, including pornography, since the late 1990s.

Before buying OnlyFans, he also owned a successful adult webcam business.

Radvinsky did not respond to a BBC interview request.

What is the company behind OnlyFans?

Fenix, the company that owns OnlyFans, is still registered in the UK, even though Radvinsky is based in the US.

The company’s chief financial officer, Lee Taylor, is based in the United Kingdom, according to Companies House records.

Public records show that investor and founder Guy Stokely resigned as parent company of OnlyFans in December 2021.

In the same month, Tim Stokely, Guy’s son, stepped down as chief executive of OnlyFans to “dedicate himself to new ventures”.

Under Radvinsky’s ownership, OnlyFans flourished. It is no longer just associated with pornography and some of its biggest creators only publish non-explicit content.