Billionaire OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky has died from cancer at 43

Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire owner of OnlyFans, has died. He passed "peacefully after a long battle with cancer" at age 43, according to a statement from the platform published by Forbes. He was born in Ukraine, but grew up in Chicago.

Radvinsky didn't create OnlyFans. He purchased it back in 2018, though is largely credited with transforming it from a niche website to a gigantic porn empire. The platform became so huge that reports have indicated that Radvinsky personally made nearly $2 million every day in 2024. His net worth at the time of his death grew to $4.7 billion, which had more than doubled since 2021.

It has been reported that he was in talks to sell OnlyFans in a deal valued at $8 billion. It's long-been rumored that he bought a controlling stake in the platform for around $30 million back in 2018, though that number has never been officially confirmed.

Radvinsky was famously secretive and avoided giving interviews, but his history is not without controversy. He built his fortune with websites that were much shadier than OnlyFans. Radvinsky founded a similar site called MyFreeCams back in 2004 when he was in college, which has been involved in numerous scandals.

He also founded a website called Cybertania, which provided links to various pornograpy sites. Some of these links claimed to direct users to illegal content involving children and animals.

Forbes did a deep dive into this and found that the site didn't actually lead to the offending content, but it's still likely that Radvinsky and the platform made money by getting people to click on the links. Records also indicate that Radvinsky held domain names like "websyoungest.com" and "aretheylegal.com" until 2014. It's currently unknown what those sites hosted.

He's also been sued for everything from spamming users to impersonating large companies like Microsoft and Amazon to direct traffic to his pornography sites. These cases were all settled outside of court for undisclosed sums of money.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/billionaire-onlyfans-owner-leonid-radvinsky-has-died-from-cancer-at-43-163211324.html?src=rss