Little feature about Leonid Radvinsky, controlling owner, in the WSJ about exploring a sale of the company for $billions.

Born in the Soviet Union, Radvinsky moved to the Chicago area when he was a child. He spent at least part of his youth not far from [future wife Katie] Chudnovsky, another childhood Jewish émigré from the Soviet Union, who was just a couple of years behind him at Northwestern.

Radvinsky saw business opportunities in the salacious side of the internet while he was still a student at Glenbrook South High School in the suburb of Glenview.

High-school classmates say Radvinsky, who played competitive chess when he was as young as 10, was a smart, sometimes abrasive teen who liked to wear a leather jacket in defiance of the Abercrombie & Fitch-inspired prep styles of the time. At school, Radvinsky’s online business was a poorly kept secret.

That business was called Cybertania—its incorporation papers were signed by Radvinsky’s mother in 1999 when he was still a teenager. One of its first gambits was operating websites such as Ultimate Passwords, which he registered in 2000, that claimed to offer hacked passwords to porn sites.

Some of the hundreds of pornographic website names he owned, according to internet records, included names of celebrities and actresses popular at the time like Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Shannon Elizabeth and Ben Affleck. Many of the sites promised links to various X-rated videos.

Radvinsky’s business continued to grow and he started other corporations, including a website called MyFreeCams in 2004. It was the early days of what became known as “camming,” in which models blend casual chats with sexually explicit live content that their users pay for online....

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Regarding OnlyFans:

Things really took off in 2020 as pandemic shutdowns left people looking for ways to make income and feel less lonely. The service added nearly 300,000 new users every day in 2021, according to British corporate filings.

The revenue model is simple: Subscribers’ payments are split so 80% goes to creators and 20% goes to OnlyFans.