image source, Leonid Radvinsky via LinkedIn
OnlyFans’ profits have soared in the past year and news that its owner has pocketed more than $300m (£238m) in dividends has raised new questions about the porn mogul.
Leonid Radvinsky is a 41-year-old Ukrainian-American entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $2.1 billion.
He bought the company in 2018 from father and son team Guy and Tim Stokely, who had started it two years earlier with an investment of £10,000 ($12,500).
He is believed to have paid millions of pounds for it. But who is he and where does his money come from?
What do we know about him?
Quite frankly, very little. Despite the premise of the platform he owns, Mr. Radwinski chooses to keep his personal life private. He hasn’t given many interviews.
Yet despite his apparent aversion to publicity, there are hints of his life in a LinkedIn profile and personal website.
According to his LinkedIn, Mr. Radwinski is a venture capital investor, philanthropist and technology entrepreneur who has a “special interest in emerging social media platforms.”
On his own website, Mr. Radwinski says he has spent the past two decades “building software companies and contributing to the open source movement.”
Born in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, Mr. Radvinsky’s company donated to rescue efforts in Ukraine using cryptocurrency, and the real value of the donation in 2022 reached more than $1.3 million, according to CoinDesk.
Mr. Radwinski says he donates “tremendous amounts of time, effort and money to nonprofit causes,” such as charities and tech ventures.
Outside of programming and philanthropy, he “is an avid reader who is always up for a chess match and is an aspiring helicopter pilot,” according to his website.
Where does he live?
His family moved to the United States when he was a child and settled in Chicago, writes the Daily Telegraph. He now lives in “sunny Florida”, but we don’t know exactly where.
The billionaire is described by Forbes as a married man, but the BBC has been unable to verify the identity of his wife.
Business history
OnlyFans is not Mr. Radwinski’s first venture into the pornography industry.
Mr. Radwinski studied economics at Northwestern University, near Chicago, Illinois, and graduated in 2002. Since then, the entrepreneur has dabbled in several projects.
Before becoming the sole shareholder of OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix, he founded a website referral business called Cybertania.
According to Forbes, the business offered users password links to content, including pornography, beginning in the late 1990s.
Before buying OnlyFans, he also owned a successful adult webcam business.
Mr Radwinski did not respond to a BBC request for an interview.
Who is the company behind OnlyFans?
Fenix, the business that owns OnlyFans, is still registered in the UK, although Mr Radwinski is based in the US.
But the company’s chief financial officer, Lee Taylor, is based in the UK, according to Companies House records.
Public records show that investor and founder Guy Stokely resigned from OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix, in December 2021.
That same month, Tim Stokely, Guy’s son, stepped down as CEO of OnlyFans to “pursue new ventures”.
Under Mr. Radwinski’s ownership, OnlyFans has thrived. It is no longer only associated with pornography, and some of its biggest creators only post content that is safe for work.
How much money does OnlyFans make?
The London-listed firm said in August 2023 that pre-tax profits for the period reached $525 million, up from $432 million a year earlier.
In the past year alone, the number of creators on OnlyFans jumped 47% to nearly 3.2 million, while the number of users grew 27% to nearly 239 million.
But the platform is also facing criticism and renewed attention from regulators and governments.
At the time, OnlyFans said its age verification systems exceeded regulatory requirements.