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Leo Radvinsky is asking as much as $8 billion for the platform he popularized for sex workers and others producing explicit content, even as he personally avoids the spotlight

Leo Radvinsky has a bare-bones personal website that describes him as a company builder, an angel investor and an aspiring helicopter pilot. His personal foundation website highlights his commitment to open-source software and to philanthropic giving to causes like the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Buried, however, is any mention of the main source of Radvinsky’s wealth: the pornography-fueled subscription site OnlyFans that he built into an online sex powerhouse.

A Northwestern University economics graduate, he has transformed online pornography from a business based largely on ad-supported X-rated videos into a social-media service offering the alluring—and lucrative—illusion of companionship. OnlyFans now boasts more than 300 million users, many of whom pay fees for subscriptions to a creator’s page, pay-per-view videos and personalized interactions.

Its creators include sex workers but also moonlighting amateurs, pop stars and other saucy celebrities who often offer explicit content for their paying subscribers.

“OnlyFans completely changed the industry because it opened it up to the average person to be able to be a performer,” said Alana Evans, who has been in the adult-entertainment industry since 1998 and heads the Adult Performance Artists Guild union.

Yet despite being a global king of porn, it would be an understatement to say Radvinsky keeps a low profile. The 43-year-old has mastered the art of staying unseen.

He doesn’t give interviews and stays away from industry events. A single photo of him smiling with his arms crossed has circulated on the internet for years. People who have worked with Radvinsky say they are bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Through an OnlyFans spokeswoman, Radvinsky declined to comment for this article.

But Radvinsky, who was raised outside of Chicago and now lives in Florida, is making a bid to climb the ranks of the world’s richest people. Radvinsky’s parent company, which owns OnlyFans, has sounded out banks and potential buyers, asking for as much as $8 billion, people familiar with the talks said.

Radvinsky’s fortune, including the value of OnlyFans, is already estimated by Forbes to be nearly $4 billion. British corporate records show that OnlyFans is hugely profitable—Radvinsky is its sole owner and collected nearly $1.3 billion in dividends in the five years ended in March 2024.

A multibillion-dollar exit would possibly allow Radvinsky and his wife, Katie Chudnovsky, to plow more money into philanthropy. He says on his personal website that he hopes to someday sign the Giving Pledge, which would be a public commitment to donating most of his wealth to charity. In a rare public appearance, Radvinsky attended a 2024 gala for a gastrointestinal research foundation on whose board his wife has served for over a decade.

At the gala, Chudnovsky, who now chairs the foundation, spoke about a $23 million grant program for cancer research that she and her husband had helped support.

“Because of the scientists behind the research we are funding, one miracle followed another. The advances will forever change the face of cancer treatment. And Leo’s here tonight proving that science and miracles go hand in hand,” she said.

The foundation’s YouTube account removed its video of that gala shortly after The Wall Street Journal mentioned it to OnlyFans.

The site’s London-based parent company, Fenix International, was in talks earlier this year over a potential acquisition by a group led by Forest Road, a Los Angeles-based investment bank and advisory firm, according to people familiar with the talks.

It is now unclear if those talks are ongoing. Radvinsky and his team are moving forward with talks with another potential buyer described as their preferred option, one person said.

Even an $8 billion price would be a considerable discount to what other fast-growing tech companies would fetch that are even close to as profitable as OnlyFans.

All of which raises the obvious due-diligence question for any transaction of this size: Who is the emperor behind the empire?

Born in the Soviet Union, Radvinsky moved to the Chicago area when he was a child. He spent at least part of his youth not far from Chudnovsky, another childhood Jewish émigré from the Soviet Union, who was just a couple of years behind him at Northwestern.

Radvinsky saw business opportunities in the salacious side of the internet while he was still a student at Glenbrook South High School in the suburb of Glenview.

High-school classmates say Radvinsky, who played competitive chess when he was as young as 10, was a smart, sometimes abrasive teen who liked to wear a leather jacket in defiance of the Abercrombie & Fitch-inspired prep styles of the time. At school, Radvinsky’s online business was a poorly kept secret.%

That business was called Cybertania—its incorporation papers were signed by Radvinsky’s mother in 1999 when he was still a teenager. One of its first gambits was operating websites such as Ultimate Passwords, which he registered in 2000, that claimed to offer hacked passwords to porn sites.

Some of the hundreds of pornographic website names he owned, according to internet records, included names of celebrities and actresses popular at the time like Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Shannon Elizabeth and Ben Affleck. Many of the sites promised links to various X-rated videos.

Radvinsky’s business continued to grow and he started other corporations, including a website called MyFreeCams in 2004. It was the early days of what became known as “camming,” in which models blend casual chats with sexually explicit live content that their users pay for online.

Radvinsky and Chudnovsky married in 2008, under a crystal chuppah at a glitzy Chicago-area banquet hall, according to a wedding announcement in the Chicago Tribune. Chudnovsky, a lawyer who had her own practice, has in recent years described herself in charity bios as the general counsel of an “international privately held technology firm.”