OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky dies at 43

Investing.com -- Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire owner of adult content platform OnlyFans, died of cancer on Monday. He was 43.

OnlyFans told Bloomberg in an emailed statement that Radvinsky passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer.

Radvinsky bought a majority stake in the platform in 2018 and owned the OnlyFans parent company, Fenix International Ltd., according to the company's last filing in the UK. Under his ownership, the platform became a cultural phenomenon by allowing creators to charge directly for their, often explicit, content.

His death raises ownership questions over one of the most controversial user-generated platforms to arrive since Facebook. OnlyFans was founded in 2016 by British father and son Guy and Tim Stokely. The platform rose to fame by hosting pornographic material forbidden on most social networks and grew in popularity during the pandemic.

Radvinsky had been in talks to sell a 60% stake in OnlyFans in a deal giving the site an enterprise value of around $5.5 billion. Architect Capital, an investment firm based in San Francisco, had entered talks to lead an offer with equity and around $2 billion in debt, according to a Bloomberg report. As of February, the talks were still in their early stages.

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