Obituary: Leonid Radvinsky, OnlyFans owner

When Leonid Radvinsky died of cancer at the age of 43, his family “requested privacy at this difficult time”. Many do, but privacy was something Radvinsky had assiduously protected for himself while making a fortune from encouraging millions of others to have little modesty about what they shared online.

The Ukrainian-born, US-raised tech entrepreneur had an estimated net worth of £3.5bn – as much as Taylor Swift, Sir Paul McCartney and Tiger Woods combined – but he didn’t give interviews, was seldom photographed and revealed little of his interests apart from chess and flying helicopters. Even the exact date of his birth was undisclosed.

Those who gave his company 20% of their income from selling explicit videos on the online platform OnlyFans were less coy. When the unrestrained exhibitionism of its 4.63 million content creators met the panting enthusiasm of 378 million users it created a pornographic goldmine that last year earned the performers more than £4.3bn.

Tim Stokely, a businessman from Essex, created OnlyFans in 2016 with a £10,000 loan from his father. His aim was to monetise content that people were posting for free online, advertising it as the place “where having fans PAYS!” In 2018 he was contacted by Radvinsky, founder of a website that hosted sexual webcam shows, who bought a 75% stake in OnlyFans for an undisclosed sum. What had been a fairly PG-rated video-sharing site rapidly became NSFW (not safe for work) and lucrative for its unblushing creators and the shy new owner. The pandemic gave OnlyFans a turbocharge as bored men with time on their hands and women worried about paying the bills discovered each other online. In 2021, Radvinsky was paid a dividend of about £210m. Three years later, his slice was £525m.

Critics said it was immoral and exploitative, luring women into degrading themselves for money while the company grew rich as their pimp. Its creators argued that this form of sex work was empowering, safe and self-controlled. OnlyFans’ moderation bans anything illegal, but in 2021 the BBC reported that under-18s were able to get past age-verification checks to post explicit videos. It led to the site banning sexual content temporarily.

OnlyFans attracted celebrity creators, such as Lily Allen, who posted photos of her feet for fetishists paying £8 a month. After being criticised for being reduced to satisfying voyeurs, Allen said: “Imagine having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet.”

The singer and actor Kate Nash similarly used her OnlyFans fame to make a point about the poor rates paid to musicians. She funded a tour by sharing photographs of her bottom in fishnets and silky briefs. “It turns out I was sitting on a pot of gold,” she said.

Among its most notorious, or celebrated, performers were Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips who bragged about how many men they could have sex with in a day like Messalina, the libidinous wife of the Emperor Claudius, competing for bedpost notches with Rome’s top prostitute. Blue’s exploits finally became too much for OnlyFans and it banned her last June.

Last year Fenix International, OnlyFans’ parent company, entered into talks with investment firms Forest Road Company and Architect Capital about selling a large stake in the company for a reported £5.9bn, but nothing was concluded.

Leonid Radvinsky was born to a Jewish family in Odesa in 1982 and began writing programmes as a child on his grandfather’s i386 PC. The family emigrated to Chicago and he studied economics at Northwestern University in Illinois, where it is said he met Yekaterina Chudnovsky. They married, had four children and settled in Florida, but the family has no visible social media presence.

Aged 17, Radvinsky created a company called Cybertania, which was behind several ventures claiming to offer “hacked” passwords for pornographic websites. One advertised “pre-teen passwords”, another “the hottest underage hardcore”, though a Forbes investigation found no evidence of them being linked to illegal content. It seems he had simply found an early talent for duping money out of the stupid and lustful. As Forbes noted: “It was a scummy business, but a profitable one.”

In 2004 two years after graduation, Radvinsky launched the website MyFreeCams, which reportedly had 100,000 models stripping and performing online sex acts for a monthly audience of 30 million. The same year, Microsoft and Amazon sued him for allegedly sending spam emails. The case was settled out of court.

You would suspect none of this from looking at his other companies. In 2009 he created Leo, a boutique venture capital fund for tech firms, whose website calls him “a respected e-commerce pioneer and experienced company-builder”. His own website says he is “an accomplished company architect, angel investor, philanthropist and open source software supporter”. It mentions backing for a networking software called Pleroma and the Elixir programming language, as well as his support for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, the West Suburban Humane Society and other several charities. In 2022, he gave $5m to Ukraine relief.

Leonid Radvinsky, internet entrepreneur, was born in May 1982 and died on 20 March 2026, aged 43

Photograph by Leonid Radvinsky via Facebook