Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-born entrepreneur who after a teeenage career profiting off spam and porn websites made billions—$1.9 million a day, Forbes once reported—as the reclusive owner of the porn-creator site OnlyFans, died of cancer at 43, a company spokesperson said Monday.
Key Takeaways
- Radvinsky died “peacefully after a long battle with cancer,” an OnlyFans spokesperson told Forbes Monday morning.
- Radvinsky purchased OnlyFans in 2018, transforming the fan subscription service that lets users pay for exclusive content from creators from a niche website to a hugely popular porn business, which Forbes reported was making him $1.9 million per day in 2024.
- OnlyFans’ burgeoning popularity, which skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, lifted Radvinsky’s fortunes, with Forbes naming him a billionaire in 2021, and he more than doubled his net worth to $4.7 billion by the time of his death.
- But OnlyFans was far from Radvinsky’s first venture as a porn mogul, as the secretive billionaire—who never gave interviews—first built a shady business as a teenager in which he operated websites that claimed to lead users to porn content involving underage children or bestiality.
- A previous Forbes investigation found no evidence these websites really linked to the content they promised, but Radvinsky still made money off of every click.
- Radvinsky’s early career may have been murky and legally dubious—he settled lawsuits from both Amazon and Microsoft, who objected to the use of their company names in apparent spam campaigns—but his porn entrepreneurship made him millions long before he bought OnlyFans, Forbes previously reported.
Forbes Valuation
Radvinsky was worth $4.7 billion at the time of his death, according to Forbes estimates, making him the No. 869 wealthiest person in the world. He ranked No. 181 on the 2025 Forbes 400 ranking of the wealthiest people in America. Radvinsky paid himself $1.8 billion in dividends through early 2025, and OnlyFans generated $1.4 billion in revenue in 2024 as users spent $7.2 billion on the platform. Radvinsky was in talks to sell OnlyFans in a deal that would value the company at $8 billion, Forbes reported in August.
Radvinsky Started His Career In The Porn Business At 17
A Ukraine native, Radvinsky grew up in the Chicago area and founded his first business, Cybertania Inc., in 1999 when he was 17, operating a number of websites promising “hacked” passwords to porn sites. A Forbes investigation in 2021 found some of these websites, including Password Universe, promised links offering thousands of “illegal pre-teen passwords” or “the hottest bestiality site on the web,” among other porn content, though Forbes found no evidence these websites really linked to what they promised. Still, Cybertania said Ultra Passwords generated $5,000 a day in 2002, or $1.8 million for the year, according to a lawsuit the company filed against internet domain operator Verisign in 2002, as Radvinsky charged actual porn websites to direct traffic their way. After graduating Northwestern, Radvinsky founded MyFreeCams, an adult webcam site that reportedly served more than five million customers by 2010. Though exact financial details of MyFreeCams are unclear, Radvinsky apparently made millions, which he used to fund a lavish lifestyle: He spent more than $10 million on lakefront apartments in Chicago between 2008 and 2016, Forbes previously reported. His early porn ventures sometimes ran into legal troubles, with Radvinsky facing lawsuits from Amazon and Microsoft for allegedly spamming campaigns that used their names in faux promises for free money or porn links. MyFreeCams settled both cases out of court.
Who Really Was Leonid Radvinsky?
Photos of Radvinsky are rare, and little is known about his personal life. He married Katie Chudnovsky, an attorney whose biography on multiple charity websites says she is a “general counsel for an international privately-held technology firm,” in 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chudnovsky told Sanctuary Magazine, a women’s publication, in 2021 that she has four children.
How Did Onlyfans Grow Under Radvinsky’s Ownership?
OnlyFans, founded by Tim Stokely in 2016, had a modest 13 million users in 2019, shortly after Radvinsky purchased the company. But it jumped more than tenfold to 188 million users by 2021, in part thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, when many people sought original ways to make money from home. The platform became a pop culture phenomenon in 2020 as celebrities, including rapper Cardi B and former Disney Channel actress Bella Thorne, joined the platform, while Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion mentioned OnlyFans on their song “Savage.” The platform nearly alienated users in 2021 when it announced it would ban sexually explicit content, which Stokely blamed on pressure from banks it had partnered with—but after days of backlash, it reversed course. OnlyFans has sparked some controversy and lawsuits amid its rapid growth, including accusations the platform’s age restrictions could be circumvented. But OnlyFans told the BBC it takes violations of its age restrictions “very seriously” and uses “state-of-the-art technology together with human monitoring and review to prevent children under the age of 18 from sharing content on OnlyFans.”
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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