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OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky died at 43 after a "long battle with cancer."
Leonid Radvinsky/Facebook
The unexpected death of OnlyFans founder Leonid Radvinsky has opened the door for a major Hollywood player to make a play for the adult content platform.
On Monday, the company announced that Radvinsky had died of cancer at the age of 43. Few outside of his inner circle were aware of the severity of his illness. Earlier this month, P6H heard that Radvinsky was gravely ill and eager to unload the creator-led behemoth that generated $1.4 billion in revenue in 2024, and has hosted everyone from Cardi B to Drea de Matteo to Whitney Cummings.
“He was desperately trying to put the sale in place because he was worried about his family being taken advantage of,” the source told us Tuesday.
OnlyFans generated $1.4 billion in revenue in 2024. NurPhoto via Getty ImagesSince it first entered the public conversation, OnlyFans has evolved from being a platform dominated by porn to something more mainstream. Its two biggest areas of growth are in comedy and sports which could make it an attractive asset for more traditional players in the entertainment space.
Last year, Scooter Braun was circling, though deal terms were never reported. Investment firm Forest Road was also reportedly in talks to buy OnlyFans for $8 billion, roughly the same amount the Ellison family spent to acquire Paramount last year. But few in town believed that Forest Road — a relatively small player in Hollywood which produced Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Kindergarten Teacher” for Netflix and Guy Nattiv’s “Skin” for A24 — could muster that kind of cash.
Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bay Area-based Architect Capital was in talks to buy a 60 percent stake of OnlyFans at about $3.5 billion. That deal would’ve put a $5.5 billion valuation on the company. The price presumably dropped $2.5 billion from the possibly inflated numbers floating around during the Forest Road talks thanks to Radvinsky’s health crisis. But that still would leave 40 percent up for grabs for some tech-minded Hollywood player eager to harness those 3 million-plus OnlyFans subscribers.
The line between Hollywood and the tech industry has become increasingly blurred, especially over the past year as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison helped his son David beat out rival Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons have made no secret of their plans to use AI to create efficiencies across what will be a colossal entity. Ellison also has a $2 billion stake in TikTok (via Oracle), which relies on AI to shape a user’s feed. A decade ago, a serious business discussion of OnlyFans would have been deemed gauche in certain Hollywood circles. Nowadays, given the state of the traditional scripted world, it would be foolish not to consider it.
Ari Emanuel is said to have kicked the tires on OnlyFans. (A WME rep denied he has expressed any interest.) Still, given that Endeavor is now private, the timing could be right for someone like Emanuel, now the executive chairman of WME Group and CEO of the publicly traded TKO Group who is widely praised for his bets on WWE and the UFC which have paid off massively.
There is also some overlap between Architect and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that helped Emanuel go private when it completed its $25 billion acquisition of Endeavor Group Holdings one year ago.
Top OnlyFans influencer Sophie Rain mourned the platform’s founder this week.Architect Capital’s VP Carlos Ezquerro was also working at Silver Lake in 2023, when formal discussions over Endeavor Group Holdings going private were underway.
Either way, the HBO hit that created Emanuel’s alleged alter-ego Ari Gold even had a plot line about the profit potential of porn. “When Endeavor was started, it was founded partially on a tech play regarding music distribution on the internet,” a source involved with Endeavor’s founding says. “The tech play became instead about Ari’s friends who became the models for the ‘Entourage’ crew trying to get into online porn.”
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