On 20 March 2026, the servers kept humming, the subscriptions kept charging, and the 20% cuts kept flowing. But Leonid Radvinsky was gone. By every metric the modern world uses to measure a successful life, he had it all. Billions in the bank. A platform with 305 million users. He was, by the world’s standards, winning.
Then he died.
The Machine He Built
OnlyFans did not invent the exploitation of women. Capitalism had been doing that for centuries. But Radvinsky industrialised it.
Under his ownership from 2018, the platform pivoted hard into pornography and became a global marketplace for explicit content. Revenue went from $59 million in 2019 to $1.4 billion in 2024. The model was simple: commodify the body, take a 20% cut, scale it globally. It is the same logic capitalism applies to everything it touches, except here the product was human dignity.
The defenders will say women chose this. And yes, within the system they operate in, many did. But what kind of system is it that presents the sale of your body as a legitimate economic option? What kind of society manufactures financial desperation and then calls the outcome empowerment?
OnlyFans was not a revolution. It was the market doing what the market always does: finding a new way to monetise the vulnerable, wrapping it in the language of freedom, and making someone very rich in the process.
What Billions Cannot Buy
Allah (SWT) is explicit in the Quran about what this world actually is:
And what is the life of this world except the enjoyment of delusion
Surah Al-Imran, 3:185
The Quran calls this world a delusion, a mirage that appears to offer everything and delivers nothing that endures.
We live inside a system that tells us the goal is accumulation. The bigger house. The better car. The number in the account. And there is a version of that seduction aimed directly at Muslim youth too, dressed up in halal language. Hustle culture with a bismillah at the start. Ambition repackaged as tawakkul.
But the Quran is not confused about what wealth is:
Do not let your wealth and your children divert you from the remembrance of Allah. And whoever does that, then those are the losers
Surah Al-Munafiqun, 63:9
The Islamic view on wealth is not that money is haram. It is that money is a test. An amanah. The question is never how much you accumulated. It is what you did with it, and whether it brought you closer to or further from your Creator. Radvinsky’s death is not a lesson about him. It is a question directed at us: what are we building, and for what?
Later Never Came
This is the sharpest edge of this story. Muslim youth in the UK are told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that deen is for later. Pray when you are older. Settle down first. Get the career sorted. Enjoy your youth. There is a comforting assumption buried in that thinking: that later will come.
Radvinsky was 43. Not elderly. Not winding down. At the height of his power, negotiating an $8 billion sale, still building. And then he was gone.
The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said: “Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a traveller.” (Bukhari)
A traveller does not unpack and settle in. A traveller knows the stop is temporary. The tragedy of the modern mind is that it has forgotten it is travelling. And this forgetfulness is not accidental. It is manufactured. By the same culture that turned women’s bodies into a subscription service, that turned your attention into a product, that profits from you forgetting Allah (SWT).
Death does not consult your age, your bank balance, or your plans. The Quran does not soften this:
Every soul shall taste death
Surah Al-Imran, 3:185
He didn’t run out of money. He ran out of breaths. The “later” you are counting on is a lie sold to you by the same culture that wants to monetize your attention and distract you from your Creator.
The Real Question
The news cycle will move on. OnlyFans will find a new owner. The machine will keep running. Youth. Health. Time. These are not guarantees. They are gifts with no fixed expiry printed on the label.
The Prophet (SAW) said: “Take benefit of five before five: your youth before your old age, your health before your sickness, your wealth before your poverty, your free time before your preoccupation, and your life before your death.” (Al-Hakim)
The aim of this life is not to accumulate. It is to stand before Allah (SWT) with something worth accounting for. A man died at 43 with $4.7 billion and left behind a platform built on the exploitation of women. The world called him successful.
Ask yourself: by whose measure are you living?
The accountability is coming. The only question is what you do before it arrives.
