The owner of OnlyFans, a site known for its adult content that is credited with revolutionising the online porn industry, has died at the age of 43.
Leonid Radvinsky, who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Chicago, had purchased the company in 2018 from its two UK-based founders.
The site’s popularity surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, landing him on Forbes’ annual list of billionaires just three years later.
He “passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer,” OnlyFans confirmed in a statement, which asked for privacy for his family.
Now that’s a username/post combo!
More dead billionaires, please.
especially one that donated to AIPAC.
Good
EDIT: Example of what I mean by how much OF has ruined mainstream social media.
I went on Facebook earlier this eve. I saw a video from Bentellect show up on my reels, a content creator with 17M total followers across all his socials. About 60% of his videos are him reacting to people’s online posts. The other 40% (the ones that the algorithms are actually promoting) are ones of him and his girlfriend in their underwear picking outfits out for each other and doing some silly fake catwalk poses on a treadmill. And of course, each of these videos begins with her strutting past the camera, full view of her huge panty-clad arse.
Check profile, click link to Instagram, oh look, a LinkMe URL, which takes me to a profile where about 90% of the page is taken up by links to their separate OnlyFans pages, and about 5% of the page has a few puny buttons linking to Ben’s Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and X pages. And of course most of her videos are pay-to-view with some requring as much as a $100 tip.
This seems to be something he’s done ever since he started dating an ex-pornstar, which I assume was rather recently based on his post history.
I’m not exactly mourning this guy’s death. Not only because of his financial support for the US Republicans, but because OnlyFans has single-handedly ruined the online pornography and greater social media landscape.
You can’t go on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, X, any dating app, or even Reddit anymore without seeing how much e-girls have astroturfed and spammed the absolute shit out of these platforms. And the way they get past content guidelines (which should’ve had them banhammered outside of Reddit) is with an allmylinks or linktree URL in their bio where half the links are trying to lull you into paying $20/month to see their nudes. Then you have models like Bonnie Blue who have genuinely gained infamy from doing it with over a thousand guys in a single day, in the kind of publicity stunt that has shown just how low the bar has fallen.
Amateur porn used to be about exhibitionism. Now it’s all shot with professional grade studio setups and you don’t get any kind of interaction or engagement unless you bankroll a model’s influencer lifestyle. We’ve genuinely commodified female interaction as a society and made bank off of findom. That I think is more damaging to society than the lack of ID & age verification checks on porn sites, and why I think the Dead Internet Theory held a lot of weight years before the rise and wide adoption of generative AI…
On top of that, it’s simply poor value for money. We rag on the television and film industries for the amount of competing streaming platforms they’ve created which have all-but-reversed the money consumers saved on cable packages, yet we simultaneously celebrate OF and its ability to let you subscribe to a single creator for twice the price as a Netflix-of-porn streaming service like Pornhub Premium or Xvideos Red. And it’s not as if porn isn’t freely available all over the internet…
he also funds AIPAC, so nobody shedding tears. OF puts the money back in the hands of the “OF” acct users. Porn industry, the studios control all the money, or have the ability blacklists actors they dont like.
Disagree. Some amateur porn was about exhibitionism but most of it was about money and that money was more often than not made by human slavers. I think onlyfans is a net good for this particular industry and the issues of “spam” and content moderation are entirely separate - it’s the platforms that promote this spam as horny users are spending more time and money on the platform.
“Back in my days the women of porn were properly underpaid and fully exploited to do exactly what I wanted for way cheaper!”
I’m not mourning the death of a billionaire. And sure, the advertising of pornographic content could probably use a bit of regulation… Heck, that probably applies to advertising more broadly. But I’m not upset that sex workers today have alternatives to working with sketchy producers. I’d rather a #girlboss spam Facebook (which you shouldn’t be using in 2026 anyways) than a GirlsDoPorn situation.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. OnlyFans gives me findom or financial exploitation vibes.
I’d also say they don’t exactly have a squeaky-clean reputation either. CEASE have raised concerns about young women being exploited by their audience. They’ve also come under fire for their leniency towards accounts that repeatedly post illegal content.
Do not get me wrong, I’m not defending the seedy practices of the porn industry, especially with all the crap that went down with GirlsDoPorn. But if I can’t even meet with ladies on a dating app because I only see hordes of fake spam profiles marketing porn to me, then it’s a sign that social media has been truly enshittified with content that doesn’t even belong on a lot of these platforms.
When I refer to amateur stuff, I’m thinking more like the earlier days of Reddit’s seedy side. The only NSFW sub that I think explicity bans OF models due to wanting to uphold that exhibitionist spirit is r/gonewild.
All of your problems seem to be with things outside of OnlyFans.
It combines the sexual exploitation of mainstream porn with the economic exploitation of the gig economy
A quote directly from one of the articles you linked that I think hits the nail on the head. The problem is capitalism. The workers of OnlyFans are being exploited in the same way that Uber drivers are. Honestly, in a similar manner to how baristas and programmers and oil riggers and everyone else working under capitalism is. That’s why I’m not sad that this billionaire owner died.
The other problems you mention are problems on other platforms. It sounds like whatever dating app you are using has a problem with people using it to advertise their business- I think it’s the responsibility of the dating app to crack down on such misuse and give users a mechanism to report that.
If your Facebook feed is full of OF ads… Well first of all you should get off of Facebook because it’s terrible, but also Meta should crack down on what advertising they allow and how. Or maybe… You’re in the tiny minority if people who care?
Other platforms have tools to address similar issues. I always laugh when people complain about seeing adult content on Steam because that is turned off by default- you need to dig through your store preferences to allow that. The old LemmyNSFW instance had different communities- some allowed or even encouraged OF creators, while others banned them. That seemed to work well. I haven’t paid as much attention to FediNSFW and it’s probably still forming those sorts of structures, but I expect them to be there eventually.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect OnlyFans to have any sort of say in where and how creators advertise on other platforms. Such restriction wood be draconian.
Counterpoint: there is plenty of poorly shot amateur porn that’s free on pornhub. I’ve done some research.
they mostly been removed, and only “professional porn”, non-PH sites have largely captured most of the old videos.
A lot of it has disappeared because PH removed all videos that weren’t posted from verified accounts back in December 2020.
Yeah, xhamster is better than pornhub
dint xhamster captured most of the PH content before they sanitized it, plus some older OF content.
I didn’t know him, but apparently he financed the republicans. If that is indeed the case I say fuck this guy.
On the other hand the site took out the middleman/madam who traditionally exploited these women (perhaps man as well) So, good for them!
Edit: I’m an idiot, I’m sure the site took a fat percentage of the earnings, so technically they just replaced the pimps. And just like that my sympathy is gone…
so technically they just replaced the pimps.
They provide the platform though. Is that replacing the pimps, or replacing the hotel owners sex workers are renting rooms from?
They didn’t replace the pumps fully. Some manage accounts however if one party is trying to ban your platform then bribing them not to makes sense.
I mean taking a cut is pimpish but at least they aren’t getting beaten up and physically abused and getting STDs and whatnot.
It is a little better for them.
Thing is though legalized and well regulated full on prostitution would also be better than traditional pimps as well.
He certainly didn’t become a billionaire by charging them reasonable fees for the financial and computational infrastructure his company provided.
“long battle with cancer” should’ve been longer for him specifically
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For everyone going, “billionaire = evil, death = good,” please think the man was just 43. Fuck cancer is the first thing that should come to mind.
Anyone that holds on to that much wealth is evil.
I hear you, but I think “celebrate billionaire donor to AIPAC is dead” still takes priority over “fuck cancer” IN THIS Particular case.
Nature filtered out a real shithead from society.
Won’t someone please think of the billionaires? They’re people just like us, deserving of dignity and respect… this man spent six years guiding a machine to squeeze pennies from the lonely and desperate, paying third worlders less than a sandwich a day to meet their sexting quotas, exploiting incel’s need for connection with a slow drip of synthesized hope. That has to count for something
Lol. Good riddance.
I saw the thumbnail and thought Charlie Cox died
Rest in piss.
Thanks for ruining the lives of people who desperately clamored to this awful existence of a company, selling their bodies off to make a cheap buck.
It doesn’t seem all that bad. OnlyFans seems more like a brothel when, in the past, there were only pimps.
That wound be true if that one brothel doesn’t act like a pimp with monopoly.
$11 million donation to AIPAC. The world has lost nothing of value with his passing.
apart from a business leader making sex work safer and more profitable for sex workers
I think this may have been an unintended benefit
Agreed. Imagine being so shitty I cheered for cancer…
Onlyfam will be allowed to attend his funeral.
And no air conditioning…
I don’t wish cancer on anyone but I also kind of wish it on all the billionaires in the hope that they’d use their unfathomable amounts of wealth and power to “solve” this horrible disease.
Make a new Manhattan project of it. Get all the researchers together, throw money and resources on them until they find a cure for it. Fast!
And you imagine they’d just give the cure (whatever form that may be) away for free? That’s not what billionairs are known for! Can you imagine the calamity that such power would cause? People getting a personalized quote for
curingmanaging their cancer, which will definitely include an “affordable” monthly payment. There is an applicable recent Black Mirror episode giving you an idea of a similar scenario.No, if there is ever such an endevour, I sincerly hope it will be funded by public money and there may no patents come forth of the research or cure.
I’d be all for it but I’m actually not sure how much the public would like to spend on this topic with lots of other things to take care of too.
Billionaires on the other hand just collect wealth and don’t have to think about the public opinion. They could even market it as philanthropy.
I’m aware that they might want to keep a lid on it but that’s still better than no cure at all.
I’m sure there are rich people who still have a conscience and may even act on it. The proposed idea (public funding for such research) is just meant to sidestep the morally bankrupts, who -despite being a minority- can still screw it up for everyone. Like the orange baboon and his slavish entourage.
Make a new Manhattan project of it.
You mean steal research from other countries under a cooperation agreement and then refuse to share?
Curing cancer would be the equivalent of the Manhattan project, the moon landing, the mapping of the human genome and the making it relatively affordabl, e the discovery of both antibiotics and phage therapy, and the development and mass deployment of vaccines. It is an achievement demonstrating such wild dominance over the struggles and complexity of the physical world that I think its only comparisons would be to something like establishment of terraformed nations on Mars.
Right now we’re still developing cures for the easy cancers. Attempting to cure cancers is big business in both the pharmaceutical world and in nonprofits, and it is working, but it’s slow. Unfortunately cancers are made of our own cells so even things like curing bacterial disease don’t even really express the difficulty. But it’s happening, and general treatments and prognoses continue to improve as well as increasing numbers of cures for specific cancers in people with certain gene presentations.
Sorry about the rant, my mom died of cancer nearly a decade ago and I’m annoyed to no end by people acting like big pharma is intentionally not curing cancer to make more money, when the reality is what I said above.
I didn’t anything about big pharma and intentionally not curing it. What I’m saying it’s concentrate the efforts and throw more money on it, especially the money of billionaires.
I’m following cancer research pretty closely since a lot of family members died to it (different types of cancer), my father has it and I have a precancerous condition. I know there’s progress and effort. I just wish for it to accelerate and I sincerely believe that billionaires could do that.
Sorry I wound up on a rant combining what I meant to say to you with what I feel the need to say to some other people. Your comment was next to one such person in the thread
Yeah, but then only rich people will get the cure.
The multi billion dollar pharmaceutical industry and health insurance industry would fight ruthlessly against what you’re proposing, which we could absolutely do and probably fast.
There’s way more money in treating symptoms long term. Curing cancer is bad for business.
multi billion dollar pharmaceutical industry would fight ruthlessly against what you’re proposing
Hmm, I wonder why people like you never complain about the ‘wellness’ industry (homeopathic influencers, scam medicine pushers… etc) which is 5 times bigger than the the entire pharmaceutical industry…
Cuba has a cure for Alzheimer’s and we keep it contained there.
Hmmm. Hmmmmmm.
It’s OK gramps, let’s get you back to bed.
Clearly you haven’t experienced the US “healthcare” system.
Fortunately no.
Then you have no clue how much of a hellscape it can be. Save your insults for those who deserve it, not those who are suffering.
On the one hand…
…while on the other…
