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, OnlyFans said.

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.

Founded in 2016, OnlyFans is a social media platform where creators can post videos and photos and charge subscribers for tips or a monthly fee.

Creators share a range of content from cooking to fitness videos, but it is best known for pornography and the way it encourages creators and fans to connect through livestreams, personalised messages, and direct requests for custom-made photos and videos.

In return for hosting the material, OnlyFans takes a 20% share of all payments.

The company generated $1.4bn (£1.04bn) in revenue from more than £7bn transactions and had more than 377 million subscribers in 2024, according to its most recent Companies House filing.

About 4.6 million creators were posting to the site that year, it said.

The boom in size and popularity under Radvinsky’s ownership also brought scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators over its adult content.

In 2024, British regulators launched an investigation into whether children were accessing porn, an issue that the company at the time blamed on a technical issue.

Ofcom ultimately dropped that probe, but it fined the firm about £1m for failing to respond accurately to its requests for information about the measures it had in place to check the age of its users, who in theory must be 18 or over.

Several years prior, the platform had been accused of failing to deal with illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.

Amid increased pressure and scrutiny over its content, OnlyFans outlined plans in August 2021 to stop allowing sexual material on the platform.

However, it dramatically u-turned on the proposal days later, after the plans were met with intense backlash from users and adult performers.

The company has also been involved in legal fights with users, including some who felt scammed after learning that chats they thought they were having with OnlyFans creators were actually handled by low-paid, third parties. Those cases have not succeeded to date.

Radvinsky graduated with an economics degree from Northwestern University and most recently lived in Florida, according to his website. Forbes estimates his net worth at $4.7bn.

He had been exploring a sale of OnlyFans last year.

As well as OnlyFans, he invested in tech companies via a Florida-based venture capital firm, Leo.com.

His philanthropy included donations to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, according to his website. (BBC)

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