Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet by Björn Jeffery, May 24, 2025

Controversial OnlyFans may be about to be sold for 77 billion kronor. The platform has become a money machine — with billion-dollar profits and anonymous venture capital behind the scenes. But the biggest winner is a hidden billionaire in Florida.

In a suburb of San Diego, a McLaren sits in the garage. List price for the sports car: around 3 million kronor. Beside it stands a Porsche. The owner of the house lives alone, and feels a little lonely.

“Living alone in a big house is terribly lonely. The bigger the house, the lonelier you get,” he tells GQ. He does not lack for company, however.

CJ Clark is a 21-year-old superstar on the OnlyFans platform. Hundreds of thousands of people follow him across various social media channels, but it is OnlyFans that has paid for the cars and the house.

He is not alone in his career choice. The OnlyFans platform exploded during the pandemic when vast numbers of ordinary jobs disappeared, and time spent at home — often in front of a screen — increased sharply. For many, OnlyFans became an alternative to conventional employment, something that could be done from home despite pandemic restrictions. When society later reopened, the behavior had already taken hold. OnlyFans had become established.

To the uninitiated, the site initially looks innocent. “Support your favorite creators” reads the headline. Other similar services, such as Patreon, have existed longer and become an important income stream for creators of various kinds. This can involve musicians, artists or writers who get their fans to subscribe in order to support the person financially.

OnlyFans also gives the impression of being something similar. A video clip on the site shows two girls brushing a pony in a competition over who can make their little horse the prettiest. The difference is that when you click on the girls’ own profiles, you realize that the content they most often sell is of a completely different nature. It is, in practice, mostly explicit.

The OnlyFans phenomenon is particularly interesting from a Swedish perspective, as it has found itself at the center of a new bill that was just passed by parliament. The proposition is formally titled “Stricter approach to sexual offenses, fraud against the elderly and crimes with gender as a hate crime motive” but it is primarily OnlyFans that the politicians are referring to.

Since parts of OnlyFans will continue to be legal, it now becomes a matter of judgment. If you have paid to watch a video being streamed live and urge the person in front of the camera to do something sexual — then you may be considered a buyer of sex, which is illegal in Sweden. What is new is that it will count as purchasing sex even if the parties involved never meet physically.

The lines around what constitutes a “sexual act” are going to be — to say the least — complicated. How the police are supposed to apply this law is something few seem to understand. But the law was passed by all parties in parliament. An unusual unanimity across the political spectrum.

It is not just about the definition of sex. It is also about extraordinary amounts of money. OnlyFans is no small operation. In 2023, the company’s most recent public financial year, they had over 4 million “creators” and a staggering 305 million “fans” — customers who watch. The service turned over 6.6 billion dollars — around 63 billion kronor in today’s currency — and made a profit of 4.6 billion kronor. The year before, the profit was 3.8 billion kronor. Connecting fans and creators of this nature is evidently like printing money.

The money flows in to more than just the parent company. Eighty percent of revenues are shared with the creators who produce the content. That is how CJ Clark can afford the expensive cars in his garage outside San Diego.

What Sweden is going to criminalize is a portion of OnlyFans’ biggest business — the private content. This is images, video and communications that you do not see as a subscriber, but which are ordered or agreed between both parties. This more private part of the service accounts for fully 59 percent of OnlyFans’ revenues. And it is growing strongly — three years ago, the corresponding figure was just 40 percent.

Calling OnlyFans a porn site is therefore an oversimplification. It resembles more closely a kind of marketplace where buyers and sellers meet. With the difference that it is the seller who is selling herself — or himself — in various ways.

Critics argue that this type of commissioned work should in practice be classified as purchasing sex. If it is a direct order for a sexual service, there is no necessary distinction to be made based on how the service is delivered — digitally or physically.

The site’s proponents point out that unlike conventional porn sites, those who perform these services earn a much higher share of the revenues. Moreover, they have more control as individuals over what they are expected to perform, since the person in front of the camera controls what happens. The porn industry has long attracted heavy criticism on both these points — poor pay and a culture of abuse. The industry has also consolidated significantly, and several of the largest sites are now owned by a venture capital firm with what one might guess is an inadvertently ironic name: “Ethical Capital Partners”.

Unlike the conventional porn industry, OnlyFans has broken through society’s taboo and landed squarely in popular culture. It is now possible to find a long list of celebrities on the platform. And not everyone is selling explicit images either. The British pop star Lily Allen has an OnlyFans account where she sells only pictures of her feet — a niche that is popular with some. The account name “Lily Allen FTSE500” is both a reference to the English word for feet as well as to the well-known London stock index. Allen uses her feet to earn money.

Having an account on OnlyFans, regardless of what is posted there, has therefore become something different from being a porn star. Even if in all material respects it often resembles exactly that. In the prevailing influencer culture, the service has become a kind of business model for monetizing celebrity on social media. For some, they earn substantially more on OnlyFans than through the more traditional advertising collaborations.

As popularity grows — driven by celebrities’ acceptance of the service — it looks as though OnlyFans will continue to expand. But as with most other major internet platforms, it is easy to participate but difficult to become well known. And even harder to become wealthy. Most of the money goes to a handful of individuals at the top of the pyramid, while the rest consists of millions of semi-naked people with high hopes. There are no guarantees that you will earn anything.

The biggest winner of this contemporary phenomenon is, however, no celebrity. On the contrary, it is a relatively unknown man named Leonid Radvinsky. He is the owner of the anonymously named company Fenix International Limited — the company behind OnlyFans. He was born in Ukraine, has the company registered in the United Kingdom, but is said to live himself in Florida.

The service itself is believed to have only around 40 employees, and from 2021 to 2023 Radvinsky drew out more than 9.6 billion kronor in pure dividend payments. Sources tell Reuters that the company may be on the verge of being sold in a transaction that values OnlyFans at around 77 billion kronor.

Not everyone has to undress, then, to get rich on OnlyFans.