Chapter 1: Who was Leonid Radvinsky and what was his impact on OnlyFans?
You've probably never heard of Leonid Radvinsky, but you've probably heard of his website. It's called OnlyFans.
In case you've been living under an ascetic rock for the last six or seven years, OnlyFans is the biggest hub of amateur pornography on the internet and Leonid Radvinsky was maybe the most successful pornographer in the history of the human race until he died of cancer maybe a week ago at the age of 43. We don't exactly know when or where he died because Leonid was a super private person.
Kind of ironic, because he made billions of dollars off a website that encouraged people to bear it all for the entire world to see. Leonid took a 20% cut, and the creators got 80. Some say OnlyFans revolutionized sex work, made the world's oldest profession safer, easier. Others called Radvinsky the world's most successful pimp.
But now that he's dead, his game-changing website is at a bit of an existential crossroads, and we're going to take you there on Today Explained. Where does President Trump's speech leave us with regard to where the war is headed? And it really was, to me, the story of the commander in chief who weeks into this war is deeply uncertain about how it ends.
I'm John Feiner, co-host of the Long Game podcast. This week, Jake Sullivan and I break down the president's speech and discuss what it's like to negotiate with the Iranians. We will also debate whether Iran should accept a deal. The episode is out now. Search and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts.
My name's Amelia Gentleman. I'm a reporter with The Guardian newspaper.
And this gentleman has been writing a lot about porn lately. So we asked her to tell us about this secretive figure, the late Leonid Radvinsky.
So what we do know about him is he was born in Ukraine. He was born in Soviet Ukraine in Odessa. He moved with his family to the US when he was about six. He was a very good student, was very good at playing chess, went to Northwestern University and studied economics and graduated in the top of his class.
But even as a teenager, even before he graduated, he had somehow understood that there was money to be made in pornography or in adult content websites. And as a teenager, he set up his first website called Cybertania.
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Chapter 2: What existential challenges is OnlyFans facing after Radvinsky's death?
However, they will no doubt be kicking themselves now, eight years on, because the size of the company has absolutely rocketed.
During the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, streaming services like Netflix and Hulu saw a huge surge in popularity. However, there is one media company that went under everyone's radar but has taken over the world of entertainment. Adult entertainment, that is. OnlyFans may not be safe for work, but its business model is the envy of the world.
By 2023, Leonid Radvinsky was taking huge dividends out of the company and paid himself $472 million. By 2024, that had increased to $701 million. By the time that Leonid Radvinsky died 10 days ago, His net worth was estimated at $4 billion or somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion. And the company itself was valued at somewhere between $5.5 billion and $8 billion.
OnlyFans is crazy successful, but at some point, Leonid realizes he's going to die, and he tries to sell the company off, supposedly to ensure his family is taken care of once he's gone.
There was an attempt, I think, to sell it last summer that didn't come off, and then From the beginning of the year, the company went into exclusive negotiations with a San Francisco-based investment fund called Architect Capital. We know that the sale didn't go through before Radvinsky's death.
But the owner of Architect Capital, James Sagan, remains in exclusive negotiations to buy the firm with those interested in looking after the family trust.
Buying OnlyFans isn't like buying Instagram. So we asked Amelia what challenges come with an acquisition of this sort.
We've seen revenues grow very reliably over the last five years, but there are risks to being in this sector. Periodically, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard will... threaten to turn off their payment processing business if there is robust evidence that any of the content that's being sold on the site is illegal. And there have been historically, there have been some breaches.
But nevertheless, it's a business that operates in an area that can become risky. And there is always the risk of banks and credit card operators deciding that they no longer want to operate with the business. And that would be catastrophic.
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Chapter 3: How did Leonid Radvinsky transition from a minor scammer to a major player in adult content?
So I think, you know, these guys are flashy, you know, like they want to drive fancy cars. This is a pretty surreal environment that I've found myself in. $10 million Miami house, living with all my boys. We have Lambos, Ferraris, G3RSs. They want to have DJ careers and be YouTube influencers.
Like they're very interested in living the sort of influencer entrepreneur lifestyle that has been popularized by the Manosphere and by people like Logan Paul even. Like one of them told me they're like, I want to be the next Logan Paul. They're like, we want to be Andrew Tate, but like with, you know, less toxic. It's like they're very clearly modeling their careers off of these guys.
And so, yeah, it's, like, I think it's to make money, but also they know that there's a lot of money to be made in the self-improvement space. So I think, like, the way they say it, it's, like, they want to create, like, even more apps or more, like, e-books and more courses to help men, you know, improve.
Yeah.
And we talked recently about this character, James Fishback, who's probably a long shot gubernatorial candidate in Florida. But he takes aim specifically at OnlyFans and that culture. If you are a so-called OnlyFans creator in Florida, you are going to pay 50 percent to the state on whatever you so-called earn via that online degeneracy platform.
Are these guys too presenting quitter as sort of an alternative to being like a power user on OnlyFans? Or is it just porn more broadly or sex work more broadly? It's Pornhub and OnlyFans together. I think those are really the two big bads that they believe that they're up against. Which is ironic because they're both like living in Miami where all the OnlyFans girls live.
So it's like there's sort of like two sides of a very similar coin in this Miami kind of scape. But yes, they like on their, on Quitter's official Twitter, they have tweets where they're like, they call OnlyFans prostitution with Wi-Fi and the clearance aisle of femininity. They say porn stars like shouldn't be allowed to have kids. Also, like these tweets are very clearly AI generated.
Porn stars shouldn't be able to have kids? Guys. I mean, yeah, it's like it's like rage bait. And a lot of that, I would argue, comes from a lot of young men who've seen all many of their like female peers on the Internet have huge successes and get rich off OnlyFans. They really resent that.
And I think that's where a lot of the contempt for OnlyFans comes from, is this idea of, like, these women are outpacing you. It's the same argument that we're having about, like, women's test scores going up or women in more, like, scientific fields. It's like, these women are getting rich on the internet because of guys like you.
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