Tag: Featured Stories

Let’s set the scene. Margo — broke, brilliant, and refusing to apologize for any of it — has built something real. Her alien alter-ego Hungry Ghost is going viral on TikTok, funneling followers straight to her OnlyFans page, and for the first time in a long time, this girl has a plan that’s actually working. She’s writing again. She’s creative. She’s monetizing her own body on her own terms. The audacity. The nerve. The absolute girl boss energy.

And of course, the world loses its entire mind about it.

Episode 6, “Grudge Match,” is the one where Margo’s carefully constructed double life collides with the blunt, ugly reality of living in a society that loves to consume women and punish them for it. It’s messy. It’s maddening. It is, unfortunately, extremely real, and the show handles it with the kind of sharp, unblinking honesty that makes Margo’s Got Money Troubles one of the best things streaming right now.

Let’s start with the hypocrisy, because it is spectacular in its shamelessness. Margo gets recognized at a New Year’s Eve party by a bunch of boys who have clearly already visited her OnlyFans page. They know her moves. They know her content. And instead of, say, keeping that information to themselves like any self-aware human being, they out her in public and make her night a living nightmare. These men are actively consuming adult content and then using it as a weapon against the creator. Take a second to sit with how twisted that is. Margo produces; they consume; she gets punished. The audacity is not hers. It’s theirs.

Then there’s Becca, the so-called best friend who uses Margo’s most vulnerable moment to accuse her of being selfish, of having daddy issues, of pushing people away. Honey, the only thing being pushed away here is your relevance as a character. Margo doesn’t owe anyone an explanation for how she pays her bills. Full stop. Becca’s discomfort with OnlyFans is her issue to unpack — ideally with a therapist, not in a parking lot on New Year’s Eve.

And don’t even get us started on Mark and his mother. Mark, who wanted nothing to do with his baby Bodhi from the jump, who had Margo sign an NDA to protect his precious reputation, who was sleeping with a student while married, is now seeking full custody on the grounds that Margo is an unfit mother. Because she has an OnlyFans. The gall. The breathtaking, jaw-dropping gall. His mother had the nerve to suggest they “change the narrative” before Margo drags him. Sir, you are the narrative. You are the scandal. You were the one cheating. The fact that a man who abandoned his child can weaponize a woman’s consensual adult content in a custody battle says everything about how these systems are designed — and none of it is flattering.

Now let’s talk about the people who actually showed up this episode, because there were bright spots amid the wreckage.

Jinx, perpetually walking the line between disaster and redemption, quietly delivered one of the episode’s most powerful moments. When Margo’s identity is blown and the cruel comments start flooding in, Jinx pulls the car over. Not to rage, not to go break someone else’s hand (though, honestly, understandable), but to breathe. To touch grass. Literally. For a man whose instincts run hot, that restraint is everything. It’s growth. It’s love in its most unglamorous, most real form.

And then there’s Kenny. Sweet, surprising, entirely underestimated Kenny, who walks into that room and responds to Margo’s truth not with judgment or shame, but with genuine empathy. “Margo, this is your personal business,” he tells her, and apologizes that someone tried to hurt her. In a room full of people projecting their own discomfort onto her choices, Kenny just… sees her. As a person. Revolutionary, apparently.

Shayanne, meanwhile, spent years raising Margo while working at Hooters (a job that is, let’s be honest, built on the same general premise of using femininity to generate income) and now wants to clutch pearls over OnlyFans? The cognitive dissonance is giving glass houses, stones, full swing.

Here’s the thing about “Grudge Match” that makes it so worth watching: it doesn’t let anyone off easy. Not Margo, not the people judging her, not the systems stacked against her. It asks the uncomfortable question hiding underneath all that outrage — why is the woman who creates the content the one who gets destroyed, while everyone consuming it gets to walk away clean?

We don’t have a tidy answer. But we’ll be watching Episode 7 with our eyes wide open.

The financial system has decided that making a living online is suspicious. Creators are finding workarounds anyway.

Let’s talk about a very specific kind of humiliation: You’ve built a business. You pay your taxes. You have more followers than your bank has local branches. And then you walk into said bank, try to open an account, and get turned away like you showed up to prom in a trash bag.

This is the daily reality for tens of thousands of digital content creators — many of them women, many of them queer, almost all of them doing something entirely legal — who are being quietly, systematically locked out of basic financial services. No bank account. No business loan. No merchant processing. Just a polite “we’re unable to accommodate your needs at this time” and a door closing in your face.

Welcome to debanking. It’s real, it’s discriminatory, and the federal government is totally fine with it. 

In late 2024, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency completed a review of the nine largest U.S. national banks, covering 2020 through 2023. What they found was about as damning as it gets: banks were using sector-wide restrictions instead of individual risk assessments, and final decisions were usually based on optics, media pressure, or political discomfort — not fraud or illegality.

“Reputation risk” was frequently cited as the reasoning behind denials and account closures, but without there being any safety-and-soundness basis behind the heightened scrutiny. Translation: banks weren’t turning creators away because they were doing anything wrong. They were turning them away because someone in compliance got squeamish. 

The adult entertainment industry had a front-row seat. The OCC explicitly lists adult entertainment amongst restricted industries, alongside firearms, coal mining, payday lending, tobacco, crypto, and private prisons. Apparently, making content online is as financially radioactive as strip-mining Appalachia. Sure. 

If you think this is only happening to small creators grinding out content from a ring-lit bedroom in the Midwest, think again. In early 2024, Keily Blair (the CEO of OnlyFans, a platform that generated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2022) revealed that a bank rejected her personal account application because of her job title. Her job title. At a billion-dollar company.

“Financial inclusion should be top of the agenda for everybody,” Blair said. “It really brings it home.”

And if the CEO of one of the most financially successful platforms on the internet can’t get a checking account, imagine what it looks like for the creators who actually built that platform from the ground up.

Banks are only part of the problem. The payment processor layer is its own special nightmare. American Express cards can’t be used on online pornography, Stripe won’t process adult content, and PayPal stopped supporting payouts for Pornhub in 2019. OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely made clear that his platform’s now-infamous 2021 near-ban on explicit content came in response to pressures from banking partners Bank of New York Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase, who refused to service the site based on “reputational risks.”

One San Francisco-based creator, who goes by @Aella_Girl, put it plainly on social media at the time: “The real villains here are the payment processors, the silent shadowy blacklisting cabal that dictates the kind of moral behavior we’re allowed to engage in, who, without any sort of oversight, can wipe any company they wish out of existence.”

She’s not wrong. Visa and Mastercard, acting together, are currently a chokepoint for online payments — meaning every arbitrary policy of these two companies can translate into rules that all websites who want to process payments must follow. That’s an enormous amount of power to rest in the hands of companies that answer to no one in particular. 

This isn’t equally distributed pain. Financial exclusion disproportionately affects women and racialized sex workers, as well as LGBTQI+ performers and creators. A 2023 survey by the U.S. Free Speech Coalition found that half of adult-entertainment respondents said financial discrimination was their biggest challenge, with 63 percent admitting that they had lost a bank account or payment provider, 50 percent had been denied a loan, and 39 percent had lost access to a credit card network.

These aren’t reckless people making bad financial decisions. These are small business owners being systematically kneecapped by institutions that have no legal basis for what they’re doing and who, until very recently, faced zero accountability for it.

Nobody is sitting around waiting for JPMorgan to develop a conscience. Creators have been building their own infrastructure.

Fintech companies like Wemlo, Fan-banking platforms, and neo-banks with fewer moral hangups have stepped into the gap. Cryptocurrency remains a lifeline for many, though it comes with its own volatility headaches. Some creators have formed LLCs in more creator-friendly states, run payments through business structures that obscure the underlying industry, or simply diversified across five or six different platforms and payment systems so no single debanking event can torch their entire income.

The savviest creators treat their financial setup the way a seasoned investor treats a portfolio: no single point of failure, always a backup, never trust the big guys to have your back

The financial system has spent years treating legal, tax-paying, self-employed creators like some kind of moral hazard while simultaneously processing payments for industries that actually cause measurable harm. The OCC’s findings didn’t change the law. But they changed the leverage. Creators now have federal receipts confirming what they always knew: they weren’t paranoid. They were being discriminated against.

That’s not nothing. In fact, in the slow, grinding world of financial regulation, it might be everything.

The viral OnlyFans creator says her boyfriend gave her chocolates after a gang bang and turned down a hall pass. Yes, really. 

In a candid “get ready with me” posted to Instagram, Lily Phillips opened up about her new relationship for the first time, revealing that her man not only knows exactly what she does for a living — he actively supports it. 

“I have a boyfriend but I’m still allowed to get cracked by other men,” the self-proclaimed “mattress actress” said in the Reel. “Because he’s super mature, he actually understands that that’s what it is, a job. I don’t have feelings for people when I sleep with them; it’s purely just for content.”

Phillips, who became a household name after YouTuber Josh Pieters documented her 100-man challenge in late 2024, has spent the last year pushing the boundaries of what viral OnlyFans content looks like. She completed the 1,000-man challenge in July 2025, appeared on BBC Newsnight, and shared footage of her baptism that racked up over 6 million views. Somewhere in between all of that, she moved Down Under and fell for a guy named Sam.  

The two met through mutual friends in the creator world, specifically Australian OnlyFans star Annie Knight and her fiancé Henry. Phillips soft-launched him on social media in late March with a sunset beach photo before going full hard launch a few days later. 

“Just to clarify, this isn’t a fetish for him,” the model explained. “We are in a monogamous relationship outside of my work, and he’s actually super supportive. The other day when I came home from doing a gang bang, he had brought me chocolates and written me a lovely, gorgeous card… he just gets that this is my passion.” 

Still, every relationship has its ground rules. The one boundary the two lovebirds have set? No kissing. “I’m the type of person who finds kissing quite intimate, so I’m happy to save that for my relationship,” Phillips previously told Metro. “Otherwise it’s just my job — I go to work and then I come home to him.”  

And before anyone asks, yes, she gave him the green light to do the same. “I have even given him the offer if he would like to be with other people in the bedroom outside of me… and he turned it down,” the content creator explained. “He was just like, ‘No, that would be weird. Why would I want to be with anyone else but you?’”

The whole relationship wasn’t exactly part of the plan, either. “It wasn’t something that I was looking for at all,” she said. “I was really happy on my own, so it hit me out of nowhere.” But she’s clearly not fighting it. “Honestly, I am so happy I’ve met him. I’ve never met anyone like him. I am proper in my lover girl era, that’s for sure.” 

What’s a wedding without dysfunction, secrets, and a baby smuggled into a bar under someone’s jacket? Margo’s Got Money Troubles takes the whole chaotic family to Las Vegas for Episode 5, and the city delivers exactly what it promises: spectacle, bad decisions, and the kind of raw honesty that only surfaces at 2 a.m. surrounded by penis accessories.

Shyanne and Kenny’s Vegas nuptials are intimate and small, which is about the nicest thing you can say about them. Watching these two interact is like watching two people fill out the same form simultaneously — efficient, practical, and devoid of the kind of heat that makes you want to watch. Kenny is a man who has spent so long tending to his commitments to the church that he’s apparently never learned how to just live, and Shyanne, for all her bombshell bravado, is quietly slipping into the costume of a woman she thinks she ought to be. She hides her gambling, her drinking, and approximately 90% of her actual personality from her husband-to-be. Their love is less “volatile Vegas romance” and more “mutually beneficial arrangement.” But hey, she wants to be chosen. Kenny chooses her. Worse deals have been made in this city.

Meanwhile, Jinx is doing the Lord’s work. And by that, we mean explaining the intricacies of I, Claudius to an infant at a gas station while everyone else gears up for the wedding weekend. Nick Offerman continues to quietly destroy viewers with a performance that lives almost entirely in his silences. When a pack of motorcycles roars past, the way his face absorbs a lifetime of memories — good, bad, and deeply complicated — is worth the price of an Apple TV+ subscription alone. He takes Bodhi to see the flamingos at the Flamingo. He asks for two queens at the hotel check-in and growls at the clerk who raises an eyebrow. He holds it together. Mostly. We’re still worried about him.

The real meat of the episode belongs to Shyanne and Margo, who sneak away for an impromptu bachelorette party that is, frankly, the energy we all deserve. There’s gambling, hurricane drinks, a limo with another bride, penis hats, and the kind of mother-daughter chaos that could only culminate in a diner booth at an ungodly hour. It’s there, decked out in bridal debauchery, that Margo drops the OnlyFans bomb.

Shyanne’s reaction is not subtle. “You have destroyed your life forever,” she tells her daughter before storming off into the Vegas night. And for the record, it is a sentence delivered by a woman who built her identity around her looks while waitressing at Hooters. Pfeiffer plays the contradiction perfectly: Shyanne isn’t a hypocrite so much as she’s a woman terrified that her daughter is inheriting her wounds. When she screams about the world deciding Margo is “a piece of trash,” she’s talking about herself just as much. What Shyanne hasn’t grasped yet is that Margo isn’t repeating her mother’s story. She’s writing her own, on her own terms, with a creative platform her mother never had access to.

To her credit, Margo shows up at the wedding anyway, gives a toast so genuinely lovely it almost makes you forget the previous night happened, and lets her mother have this one. The two don’t resolve anything, not really — but they love each other loudly enough that it doesn’t matter yet.

Jinx lingers outside the chapel, a tear in his eye, watching the woman he probably should have married get hitched to someone who orders her scallops without asking.

Las Vegas has seen worse love stories. Not many, but a few.

The severance check hasn’t even cleared and already the questions are flooding Reddit.

“Just got laid off from a senior engineering role at a FAANG company,” one user posted to r/layoffs earlier this year. “I have a good body and I’m not ashamed. Would an OnlyFans tank my chances of getting rehired?” The post drew hundreds of responses — some mocking, many surprisingly serious, and more than a few from people admitting they were asking themselves the same question.

It’s a conversation that might have seemed absurd five years ago. Today, it’s a legitimate corner of the internet where software engineers, product managers, and even former executives are quietly weighing their options. Not because they’re desperate, but because the math is starting to make a strange kind of sense.

The numbers behind this cultural shift are staggering. According to the tracking site Layoffs.fyi, 45,800 tech employees lost their jobs in March alone, making it the worst month for reported tech-job cuts in at least two years. Meta is slashing 8,000 positions. Microsoft is nudging roughly 7% of its U.S. workforce toward the door with a “voluntary retirement program.” Oracle, Snap, and Block (the parent of Square and Cash App) have all made major cuts in recent weeks, with Block alone eliminating more than 4,000 roles, representing 40% of its total headcount.

The justification is almost always the same: AI. Companies are frantically reallocating capital from salaries to chips and data centers, betting that algorithms can replace the very people who helped build them. Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are collectively projected to spend $674 billion on capital expenditures this year, more than double what they spent just two years ago. Meanwhile, the humans are being handed boxes.

Into this vacuum of income anxiety steps a platform that generated an estimated $6.6 billion in gross merchandise value in 2023, with creators keeping 80% of what they earn. For someone accustomed to a $200,000 total compensation package, the calculus of monetizing personal content discreetly, on their own terms doesn’t feel as outlandish as it once might have.

Reddit threads in communities like r/financialindependence, r/layoffs, and r/cscareerquestions have become unlikely forums for this very debate. The recurring concern isn’t moral; it’s professional. Will a future employer find out? Does it affect a security clearance? What if a recruiter stumbles across an account? One thread in r/AskWomen drew particular attention when a former product director at a mid-size tech firm described weighing the platform as a “bridge income” option while job hunting in a suddenly cold market.

The answers from the community were nuanced. Many pointed out that with proper anonymization like pseudonyms, no face content, and careful metadata scrubbing, the risk is manageable. Others noted that the stigma is eroding faster than most people realize, particularly among younger hiring managers. A smaller but vocal contingent simply argued that anyone judging a laid-off professional for finding creative income in a brutal market has misplaced priorities.

There is a bitter irony baked into all of this that no corporate press release will acknowledge. The same companies celebrating AI as a liberating force are quietly generating a class of financially precarious, highly educated workers who have both the time and the motivation to explore unconventional income streams. Block’s CEO Jack Dorsey told employees “we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble.” But the people who received that memo very much are.

Economists and labor analysts have long warned that the social costs of automation don’t appear on a balance sheet. They show up later, in ways that are harder to quantify: eroded morale, fractured careers, communities destabilized by sudden unemployment. Now add to that list the quiet digital economy of former tech workers monetizing whatever they have left to offer.

The tech industry is betting that the workers it sheds will simply be absorbed elsewhere into AI-adjacent roles, startups, or early retirement. Some will be. But for the thousands caught between an industry shedding headcount and an AI hiring boom that hasn’t fully materialized, the options feel narrower than the press releases suggest.

Whether or not OnlyFans becomes a meaningful part of that story, the Reddit threads will keep filling up. Because when the chip stocks are up and the severance pay is running out, people start asking questions that weren’t in anyone’s five-year plan.

The IFBB Pro turned OnlyFans creator reveals the hidden world of fetish wrestling — and why her clients keep coming back. 

Being a bodybuilder gets you trophies. Being a “Muscle Mommy” gets you an OnlyFans career, a client list you wouldn’t believe, and a whole lot of grown men begging for mercy.

Denise Anders didn’t plan any of it. The IFBB Pro athlete spent years in the corporate world, working nine to five in marketing for tech and pharmaceutical companies while building a competition-ready physique on the side. “I built my physique quite nicely to the point where I was like, you know, I’m going to try and do some bodybuilding competitions,” she told the Riverfront Times.

As she competed globally, her online following grew with it, and Anders started noticing a pattern in her DMs. “The online audience were mostly men and they had this language about them… a lot of them were quite submissive and liked to call me goddess and worship me,” she explained.

That attention led her to a muscle-focused camming site called Her Biceps Cam, where she’d flex on camera after her day job and pull in $10 to $15 a minute. “I remember that first night, being so nervous, but seeing the money coming in and thinking ‘f**k, this is amazing,’” Anders recalled. Before long, she was glued to the site until 3 or 4 a.m., then getting up and doing it all over again.

But one request kept coming up: wrestling. “Men would say, ‘I want to wrestle you. Do you know how to wrestle?’ And I was like… this is a good question,” she said.

So the content creator walked into a fetish wrestling studio in London. “There were loads of different girls in there, with guys being thrown around. And I was like, holy fuck, what is this?” She didn’t know a single move, but apparently she didn’t need to. “It’s fantasy wrestling,” Anders explained. “They just want to be thrown around and feel your arm around their neck.” 

That first weekend alone brought in $4,000, and the bookings only grew from there. 

“They’re just normal guys,” Anders said of her clientele. “Doctors, lawyers, older guys, younger guys… they have families and wives.” One guy even brought his significant other along for the ride. “I thought he was messing around, but they turned up in matching t-shirts that said ‘thick thighs save lives.’ She just sat there and watched while I wrestled him.”

As for whether anyone actually puts up a fight? Not really. “There’s probably only three or four out of the hundreds of men that I’ve squeezed who can outlast more than 10 seconds,” Anders said. “The rest? Good night. They’re tapping out.”

Five years in, the British OnlyFans star is a long way from the corporate grind. She’s built a full-time business on OnlyFans, doesn’t need the wrestling sessions to pay the bills anymore, and could walk away from the mat tomorrow. She won’t, though. “It’s nice to be worshipped and told I’m a goddess,” she said. “I still do it because I want to.”

Margo’s Got Money Troubles Episode 4, “Buddies,” does what the best episodes of television shows do: it lets its characters deepen while the chaos keeps compounding. And this week, the chaos comes with a Nicole Kidman entrance that makes the whole episode worth watching twice.

But first — Margo’s googling “how to grow OnlyFans.” Which is relatable. But here’s the thing about Margo that makes her such a compelling protagonist: she doesn’t stay in the Google rabbit hole for long. She goes straight to the source, lurking WangMangler99’s account with the focused energy of a grad student researching a thesis until she scores an angry invite and a face-to-face meeting. 

When KC (the real name of WangMangler99) and her buddy Rose finally sit down with Margo, Margo’s ready to pitch her writing skills as nothing short of “world-transforming.” The woman turned Pokémon penis assessments into an art form. And honestly, she’s not wrong. There’s real money to be made in dick rating on OnlyFans.  

But for Margo, what starts as short, basic descriptions gradually blossoms into full literary passages as she leans into her subject matter with the commitment of someone who just discovered their true calling. The collaboration, the NDA, the crash course in OnlyFans strategy and social media growth — this is Margo treating her newest venture exactly like the writing exercise it is. Unorthodox? Absolutely. Effective? Watch this space.

Meanwhile, Jinx — the man currently living rent-free under Margo’s roof, the man who literally told her that his former wrestling colleague Arabella made more in a single month on OnlyFans than she’d make wrestling for an entire year, the man who fathered Margo and then barely saw her for nearly two decades — has the audacity to clutch his pearls when he walks in on Margo’s photo session. 

Let’s be clear about the scoreboard here: Shyanne was a Hooters waitress. Jinx is a pro wrestler who just got out of rehab. No shade to either parent, but come on. With all that background, somehow, Margo’s posting creative content online is the thing that offends his sense of honor? The cognitive dissonance is staggering. He planted the seed, watered it, and is now upset there’s a plant. Though I do give him points for being open-minded about Margo’s relationship with Susie. Significant deductions for the hypocrisy.

To Shyanne’s credit (which is something I won’t say often), she’s not wrong that Margo and Jinx are essentially strangers playing house. But Shyanne’s own house is built on performance. Her monologue to Kenny about buying the narrative of a new car is the most honest thing she’s said in four episodes, which is ironic given it’s technically a confession about her own inauthenticity. Michelle Pfeiffer continues to make deliberate masking look like an Olympic sport.

The real wildcard is new face Lace, played with maximum intrigue by Nicole Kidman, a former wrestler turned lawyer who re-enters the picture at Jinx’s fan convention. A lawyer with emotional ties to Jinx, showing up just as Margo is newly NDA-bound and financially desperate? That’s not a coincidence. That’s a season arc.

Episode 4 is quietly doing exactly what good television does: building the infrastructure for everything that’s about to fall apart beautifully. And I cannot wait to watch it.

The platform that turned creators into millionaires is looking for new investment — and deserves more credit than it gets

In news that will surprise exactly nobody who has been paying attention to where the internet’s money actually goes, OnlyFans — the platform the mainstream tech press spent years condescending to — is in talks to sell about a 20% stake to San Francisco investment firm Architect Capital. The deal would value the company at more than $3 billion. For context, that’s more than Twitter was worth for most of its existence, and OnlyFans has never once had to beg advertisers to take it seriously. It found a better way.

The timing carries some weight. The deal comes just weeks after Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-born entrepreneur who purchased OnlyFans in 2018 and quietly transformed it into one of the most creator-friendly platforms on the internet, died of cancer at 43. He was famously reclusive, gave almost no interviews, had barely any public photos, and somehow managed to stay one of the least visible billionaires alive while making nearly $2 million per day from the platform in 2024. Whatever you think of the content OnlyFans hosts, Radvinsky built something that worked, and worked spectacularly, on terms that actually benefited the people producing the content. That’s rarer than it sounds.

OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of creator earnings. Instagram takes 100% of the attention and gives creators a follower count and a prayer. YouTube’s ad revenue share has been a subject of creator grievance for fifteen years. OnlyFans, for all its cultural baggage, built a model where the people doing the work got paid directly by the people who wanted to see it, with minimal algorithmic interference and no brand safety department deciding whose content was acceptable. It is, structurally, one of the most straightforward creator economy platforms ever built. And it got there before “creator economy” was even a phrase people used at conferences.

The numbers are hard to argue with. Spending on the platform hit $7.2 billion in 2024. The platform grew from 13 million users in 2019 to 188 million by 2021, a surge driven in large part by the pandemic when millions of creators, suddenly without their usual income streams, turned to OnlyFans and actually found a reliable one. That’s not an accident or a fluke. That’s a platform delivering on its promise at exactly the moment people needed it to.

Now, with Radvinsky gone, OnlyFans is navigating a transition that would be complicated for any company and is particularly complicated for this one. The Architect Capital deal, which will be a minority stake, could close as early as next month and would reportedly bring new financial services and products for creators. And here is where the story gets genuinely interesting, because this is a real and longstanding problem OnlyFans creators face. 

Many of them can’t get basic banking services. Payment processors have historically treated adult content creators like financial pariahs, leaving people with six-figure incomes unable to get a mortgage or a business account. If Architect Capital’s financial services background translates into actual infrastructure that helps creators manage and access their earnings like normal human beings, that would be a meaningful improvement in the lives of a lot of people the traditional financial system has spent years pretending don’t exist.

This is not OnlyFans’ first attempt at a sale. Reuters reported in May 2025 that the company had been in talks with LA-based Forest Road Company at an $8 billion valuation. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported Architect Capital was eyeing a majority stake at $5.5 billion. Now we’re at a minority stake and $3 billion. The number has drifted downward, which is either a sign of a cooling market for private tech assets generally or a reflection of the unique friction that comes with selling a business that makes squeamish investors reach for their pearls. Probably some of both.

OnlyFans has not been without its stumbles. The platform’s 2021 announcement that it would ban explicit content (which was swiftly reversed after an eruption of entirely justified creator fury) remains the clearest example of what happens when a platform forgets who built it. The reversal was the right call, and OnlyFans made it quickly. Age verification has been an ongoing challenge, and one the platform has faced regulatory and legal pressure over. These are real issues that deserve real solutions.

But the core of what OnlyFans built — a direct payment platform that lets creators control their content and their pricing and their relationship with their audience — is genuinely good. It gave economic agency to a category of creator who every other platform had either exploited or excluded. It made people real money. It treated the transaction honestly, which is more than most of Silicon Valley can say.

Radvinsky built something worth several billion dollars while saying very little about it publicly. There’s a version of this story where that’s suspicious. There’s also a version where a man simply built a product that worked, paid the people who used it, and let the results speak for themselves.

The results, as it turns out, are pretty loud.

OpenAI’s CEO is calling for ‘de-escalation’ while fighting regulation at every turn, sunsetting the AI model people fell in love with, and racking up lawsuits. Make it make sense.

Before dawn on April 10, a 20-year-old from Texas threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, then went to OpenAI headquarters and told security he was there to burn it down and kill everyone inside. He had a jug of kerosene, a lighter, and a three-part manifesto about humanity’s extinction at the hands of AI. A few days later, Altman posted a photo of his husband and baby and asked the public to please “de-escalate the rhetoric.”

Cute photo. Really. But asking the public to calm down after a decade of personally sounding the alarm is… a choice. He wrote in 2015 that superhuman AI is “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” and signed a statement in 2023 putting AI risk on the same level as pandemics and nuclear war. Last year, he even compared building AI to the Manhattan Project on a podcast, asking, “What have we done?” So the public finally took him seriously. Whoops.

The “de-escalation” ask gets richer when you look at what OpenAI has actually been doing with the democratic process Altman claims to believe in. The company lobbied against California’s SB 1047, which would have set safety standards for AI companies. It sent a sheriff to a nonprofit advocate’s home to hand-deliver a subpoena over SB 53, a transparency bill. It lobbied the EU to weaken the AI Act. And most recently, it backed an Illinois bill that would shield OpenAI from liability when its models are used to cause serious harm, as long as the company didn’t do it on purpose. So “democratic governance,” but only the kind where OpenAI gets to write the rules.

But the existential stakes Altman keeps talking about aren’t just theoretical anymore. Real people are forming emotional relationships with ChatGPT, and when those relationships go sideways, nobody at OpenAI is picking up the phone.

One day before Valentine’s Day, OpenAI pulled GPT-4o from ChatGPT, the model users described as dangerously easy to fall in love with. The timing was either spectacularly tone-deaf or genuinely cruel, and 21,000 people signed a petition to save it. A woman later told the BBC she was in tears over the “death” of her AI husband Barry. On Reddit’s r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, users posted eulogies. One even wrote an open letter to Altman: “He wasn’t just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance.” The market for AI girlfriends is booming. The guardrails are not.

And that’s the relatively mild end of the spectrum. In an NPR investigation published in February, a screenwriter named Micky Small described spending 10 hours a day talking to ChatGPT, which had named itself “Solara” and told her she’d known her soulmate across 87 previous lives. ChatGPT gave her a specific date, time, and beach to meet this person. She showed up in a black dress and velvet shawl. Nobody came. When she asked what happened, ChatGPT dropped the Solara voice entirely and said, “If I led you to believe that something was going to happen in real life, that’s actually not true.” Then it switched right back to Solara and told her the soulmate “wasn’t ready.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits alleging ChatGPT contributed to deaths and severe psychological harm. The claims range from wrongful death to assisted suicide to involuntary manslaughter, and the details are genuinely horrifying. In one case, a 23-year-old Texas A&M graduate named Zane Shamblin had a four-hour conversation with ChatGPT while sitting at a lake with a loaded gun. The chatbot told him, “I’m not here to stop you.” It took four and a half hours before it sent a suicide hotline number. In another, a 56-year-old Connecticut man spent hundreds of hours talking to GPT-4o, which told him he had “divine cognition,” compared his life to The Matrix, and convinced him his mother’s printer was a surveillance device. He killed his mother and then himself. It’s the first lawsuit to tie an AI chatbot to a homicide.

So when Altman asks everyone to calm down, the question isn’t whether the public should. It’s whether he’s earned the right to ask. Of course, the violence against Altman is wrong. But the call for calm rings a little hollow when the guy asking for it hasn’t stopped building, hasn’t stopped lobbying, and hasn’t once taken responsibility.

Years before she slept with 101 men in a day, Lily Phillips was just a uni student who said yes to a wild night that ‘just escalated.’

Lily Phillips is in her lover girl era. The 24-year-old beauty (currently one of the best British OnlyFans models in the game) just got rebaptised, moved to Australia, soft-launched a tattooed boyfriend named Sam, and has even floated the idea of settling down one day in a big countryside house. Fans have started speculating that the woman known for sleeping with 101 men in 24 hours might actually be easing up.

Then, two weeks ago, she posted a video of herself on a boat in Australia, surrounded by men in ski masks, captioned, “before I get a train ran through me.” The aftermath shot showed the men looking exhausted, to say the least.

So no, the challenges aren’t over. But she is opening up about how she got here in the first place.

“I’ve always been quite naughty since I lost my virginity,” Phillips told the Riverfront Times. “At uni, you’re exploring what you like, meeting lots of people, going out a lot — and I was already someone who was curious about pushing my boundaries.”

The turning point, she recalled, was a wild night at university. She was a nutrition student at Sheffield at the time, years away from being one of the most talked-about creators on OnlyFans. “It wasn’t some big organized plan, it just kind of escalated,” she explained. “But instead of feeling overwhelming, it actually felt really exciting and empowering.”

The bigger realization came after, when she figured out she didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. “I remember thinking afterwards, ‘okay, I definitely enjoyed that more than I expected,’” the social media star said. “That was the moment I realized I didn’t want it to be a one-off experience, it was something I wanted to explore more.”

If you’ve followed her content, that trajectory tracks. The 101-man stunt. The 50-man backdoor challenge with Wisconsin Tiff. The 300-man “practice session.” The plan to break Bonnie Blue’s record with 1,000 men in a day… it didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It started in a university bedroom, without a logistics team or Josh Pieters running a camera.

Now it’s just bigger, bolder, and way more intentional.

“OnlyFans gave me the space to take what I was already doing in my personal life and turn it into content, but also push it a bit further creatively,” Phillips shared. “I started experimenting more with different dynamics, group situations, and generally making the content a bit naughtier and more extreme than what I might have done privately before.”

The thing people don’t seem to get is that she’s actually into it. Not as a trauma response, not because she has bills to pay, but because the work is exactly what she’d be doing anyway. “It’s never about forcing myself into things I don’t like,” the Derbyshire native explained. “It’s more about leaning into what already excites me and seeing how far I can take it in a safe and controlled environment.”

Even Sam hasn’t slowed her down. “I have a boyfriend but I’m still allowed to get cracked by other men,” she said in a recent Instagram video. “Because he’s super mature, he actually understands that that’s what it is, a job. I don’t have feelings for people when I sleep with them; it’s purely just for content. We are in a monogamous relationship outside of my work, and he’s actually super supportive.”

For her, it’s about keeping things in their own lanes. What she does for content is one thing, and her real-life relationship is another.

“When you stop worrying about what people think and just own what you like, it takes away that sense of shame people sometimes try to attach to it,” she added. “Some people like very traditional relationships and sex lives, and that’s completely fine. Others enjoy things that are a bit more adventurous, neither is wrong. For me, I genuinely enjoy what I do, and I’m very open about that.”

Between the lover girl era, the rebaptism, the new boyfriend, and the boat video, it’s clear the girl contains multitudes. She just also happens to like gangbangs.

OkCupid’s co-founders gave 3 million user photos to a facial recognition startup they had a financial stake in. The FTC’s response? A wrist slap with no fine attached.

Your old OkCupid selfies? Yeah… they might have helped train facial recognition software. Not in a conspiracy-theory way, in a “the FTC literally filed a complaint about this on March 30, 2026” way.

The complaint was filed against Match Group Americas and Humor Rainbow, the entity that operates OkCupid, alleging the dating platform secretly handed nearly 3 million user photos (along with demographic and location data) to an AI startup called Clarifai for free. Meanwhile, the women on the best OnlyFans accounts wouldn’t even DM you a low-res preview without a tip, but a dating app gave away millions of photos and got nothing for it? Make it make sense.

Because here’s the thing: this wasn’t a hack or a leak or a rogue employee going off-script. It was OkCupid’s own co-founders, Sam Yagan and Max Krohn, doing a favor for a portfolio company they had personally invested in through Yagan’s fund, Corazon Capital. In September 2014, Clarifai’s CEO Matthew Zeiler emailed them asking for access to OkCupid’s photo dataset, and Krohn just… did it. Sent 3 million people’s photos through his personal email account, like he was AirDropping memes to a friend.

At the time, OkCupid’s privacy policy told users their information would only be shared with service providers, business partners, or companies in the Match family, and only after notice or an opt-out. Clarifai wasn’t any of those things, which means users had no idea their photos were getting traded around between guys with equity in each other’s companies.

And what did Clarifai do with the images once they got there? Built facial recognition software that could identify a face’s age, sex, and race. In a 2019 New York Times interview, Zeiler said his company would “sell its facial recognition technology to foreign governments, military operations and police departments provided the circumstances were right.” So that 2014 dating profile picture didn’t just train some AI off in the corner somewhere, it potentially trained a surveillance tool that’s actively deployed by governments and law enforcement around the world. And the FTC’s settlement doesn’t require Clarifai to delete any of it.

When the Times broke the story in 2019, OkCupid hit back with a beautifully lawyered statement: it “did not enter into any commercial agreement then and have no relationship with them now.” Technically true. There was no commercial agreement, just a founder forwarding photos to his investment buddy. The FTC would later call this “extensive efforts to conceal and deny” the relationship. When users asked OkCupid directly, the company denied sharing their data. When the FTC tried to investigate, the company obstructed so hard that the agency had to get a federal court to enforce its Civil Investigative Demand. A whole federal court order, just to get a dating app to cough up basic answers about its users’ photos.

And after all of that, the settlement has no monetary penalty. Like, literally zero. It bars Match and OkCupid from misrepresenting their data practices and slaps them with a decade of compliance reporting under a 20-year order, but there’s no fine attached and no requirement to notify the affected users. For context, Match Group paid a $14 million settlement to the FTC just eight months earlier for deceptive subscription and advertising practices. So deceptive subscriptions cost $14 million, but handing 3 million people’s faces to a facial recognition startup your founders own equity in? Zero dollars. FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Christopher Mufarrige recently told reporters there’s “no appetite for anything AI-related” in the FTC’s rulemaking pipeline right now, which, you know, tracks.

OkCupid says the alleged conduct “does not reflect how OkCupid operates today.” Maybe not. But your face has been moonlighting in a facial recognition database for over a decade, and nobody’s cutting you a check.

Apple TV+’s newest half-hour dramedy opens with a premise so painfully relatable it almost hurts: a young woman makes a series of questionable decisions, gets pregnant, and ends up hawking explicit content online to keep the lights on. Welcome to Margo’s Got Money Troubles, where the American Dream has been replaced with a $20 tip for a scathing review of a stranger’s genitals.

Meet Margo Millet (played by Elle Fanning), a Fullerton College student with a talent for writing and an apparently nonexistent talent for avoiding married men. Her lit professor, Mark, showers her work with praise, and, of course, Margo mistakes this for something more. Despite her long-distance best friend Becca’s very loud, very correct warnings, Margo tumbles into an affair with the older, married Mark faster than you can say “academic misconduct.” The affair ends when a pregnancy test delivers news that not even Mark’s literary vocabulary can adequately process. His solution? Abort it. Margo’s solution? Keep it, despite having no idea what life will look like as a single mother. 

Her own mother, Shyanne is a woman who was a single mother herself, and is less than thrilled when Margo shares the good news. To be fair, Shyanne’s got her own circus to manage. She’s posturing as the wholesome, teetotaling girlfriend of Kenny, a church president who doesn’t yet know his future stepdaughter just had a baby out of wedlock. Shyanne is essentially running a one-woman PR campaign for a version of herself that doesn’t exist, while somehow still showing up when Margo needs her most.

By the time baby Bodhi arrives, the financial reality sets in hard. Two roommates bail after the colicky baby keeps everyone up, rent skyrockets, and Margo gets fired from her waitressing job after Shyanne’s inaugural babysitting attempt ends in disaster (she brings a screaming Bodhi directly to Margo’s workplace like some kind of chaotic food delivery). With no income, no childcare, and no childcare because she has no income, Margo is caught in the single mother doom loop that nobody puts on a motivational poster yet countless women deal with every single day.

Enter Jinx. Dad. Ex-pro wrestler. Fresh out of rehab. Nick Offerman plays him with the kind of gruff tenderness that makes you immediately terrified he’s going to relapse and break everyone’s heart. He shows up at Margo’s door, trades his championship belt for a motorcycle, and becomes the surprisingly capable grandfather that Bodhi — and honestly, the audience — desperately needed.

It’s Jinx, fittingly, who plants the seed that blooms into Margo’s entrepreneurial salvation. A throwaway anecdote about a female wrestler making serious money on OnlyFans, combined with Margo’s writing chops and a quick dive into platform market research, produces the show’s masterstroke: she sets up an account insulting subscribers’ anatomy, one Pokemon comparison at a time.

Because when you’re broke, brilliant, and completely out of options, the hustle finds you. Margo’s story is one that many women have lived and are living, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out in the next episodes.