Nearly seven weeks after OnlyFans owner and billionaire Leonid Radvinsky died, and after months of reports that the sex-worker streaming platform was exploring a stake sale, the Financial Times reported Friday morning that San Francisco-based Architect Capital is preparing to buy a minority stake in the company.
Australian billionaire James Packer, best known as the former head of the Packer family's media and casino empire, is expected to be among a group of investors lined up to support Architect Capital's deal to acquire a 15% stake in OnlyFans at a $3.1 billion valuation, according to FT's sources.
The deal would leave control of OnlyFans with the family trust headed by Katie Chudnovsky, widow of late owner Leonid, who acquired OnlyFans in 2018 via Fenix International.
Leonid died in March at 43. He was apparently battling cancer for several years.
Top OnlyFans creator pornstar Sophie Rain mourned the death of Leonid, saying back in March how he "built something that changed my entire life. Like, I grew up on food stamps and now I can take care of my whole family because of a platform he created. I will never forget that."
Radvinsky studied economics at Northwestern University and by 2018 had bought a majority stake in OnlyFans and helped transform the video content platform into an adult-content subscription business powerhouse that reshaped how sex workers monetize their bodies.
OnlyFans was founded in 2016 and exploded in popularity during the Covid pandemic. Some of the latest data from 2024 showed the website had 4.6 million creators, 377 million fans, and $1.4 billion in revenue.
As we've previously noted, Americans spent an estimated $2.6 billion on OnlyFans subscriptions in 2025.
OnlyFans is bringing in outside capital without giving up control while leaving Radvinsky's wife in charge. This may suggest the family trust is cashing out some value while simultaneously creating a pathway for broader monetization.
Tyler Durden Fri, 05/08/2026 - 12:50On the surface today's jobs report was very strong: headline payrolls came in nearly double the expected (115K vs 65K), with unemployment flat just so Trump's chief economist Kevin Hassett could push bullish taking points in today's TV circuit such as this one.
Unfortunately, below the surface this was the ugliest jobs report in years, and one could say even more cooked than last month's laughable surge in jobs (which was revised from 178K to 185K).
Here's why.
First, while the Establishment survey showed an impressive 115K jump in jobs when virtually everyone was expecting a big drop, looking at the composition reveals two things: the biggest contributor was semi-government jobs from the Education and Health services category which added 46K, and has been the biggest, and only consistent source of jobs growth this decade.
But even more remarkable was the surge in courier and messenger jobs, which soared by 38K in April, reversing the 52K drop last month. Was there a Doordash or Uber hiring binge that we missed last month? We thought they were mostly laying off their thousands of illegal alien workers...
In other words, just two job categories accounted for almost all the job gains in April. As for the beating heart of the US economy, manufacturing jobs, they tumbled to -2,000 after surging 15,000 in March, the first negative print of 2026. Manufacturing jobs are now down 73K over the past year. Chemicals, Wood, and Machinery manufacturing are the biggest losers, but few subsectors are doing well
But what is even more concerning, is that the entire base of the monthly print was put in doubt after the BLS reported that in April, the Birth/Death adjustment "added" 391K jobs, which as we have explained repeatedly are not actual jobs but a baseline for model assumptions what the number of jobs in a given month "should" be. One would think after all the huge negative revisions to jobs under Biden as a result of flawed BIrth/Death assumptions the BLS would have learned its lesson. One would be wrong.
But stepping away from the Establishment survey, things are even uglier in the much more accurate Household Survey. It is here that we find that contrary to the abovementioned payrolls increase, the number of employed workers actually declined by 226K in April. Worse, this wasn't a one off: as shown below, the number of employed workers has been declining every month this year, and is now down an average of 343K jobs every month of 2026 after hitting a record high in Dec 2025!
Unfortunately, this means that we are once again witnessing the infamous divergence between the Household And Establishment surveys, as the number of employed workers has been declining and is now the lowest since December 2024 ot 162.622 million, the number of payrolls (tracked by the Establishment survey) is now at an all time high of 158.735 million, a number which is clearly not supported by the data.
This divergence is also why the unemployment rate remained at 4.3%: even though employment shrank by 226K to 162.622 million, the unemployment rate did not rise because people left the labor force.
There was more rot under the surface, as the number of full-time jobs in April plunged by 424K, while part-time jobs surged by 123K.
The drop in full-time jobs dragged the total number of full-time workers to levels last seen in December 2024. In other words both total employment and full-time jobs are back to where they were when Trump was elected.
But while all of the above is just the usual statistical gimmicks we have exposed every year for nearly two decades, there was something much more ominous in today's report: AI is finally coming for your job... if you are a programmer that is.
While the total number of jobs in April rose, on the abovementioned low quality Health and education and courrier (?) jobs, information jobs dropped again, sliding by 13K, having slid again... and again... and again. In fact, as shown in the next chart, Information jobs have now been negative every month since 2024!
Don't expect that to change any time soon as the impact of AI "jobs outsourcing" is now here: as Goldman Delta One head Rich Privorotsky noted, we are seeing a flood of tech layoffs among which Cloudflare laying off 20%, Paypall firing 20%, Upwork 25%, Bill Holdings 30%, Coinbase 14%, Meta 10%, Microsoft 7%... and Google saying 75% of new code is now AI-generated (and about to layoff double digits too). This excludes the bloodbath across the crypto sector where the crypto winter coupled with AI has led to especially brutal mass layoffs.
Tech companies announced 33,361 job cuts in April, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. So far this year, the industry has planned 85,411 cuts, up 33% from the same period in 2025.
“Technology companies continue to announce large-scale cuts and are leading all industries in layoff announcements,” said Andy Challenger, the company’s chief revenue officer. “Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is.”
According to Layoffs.FYI, Q1 has seen the most tech related layoffs since the tech recession of 2022.
As Goldman's Privorotsky puts it, "this phase has been the capex boom to enable what eventually becomes a far more radical labor adjustment cycle." Which means workers are laid off to make space for capex spending and the occasional stock buyback.
As he concludes, that may ultimately be what the market believes a future Fed reaction function will revolve around…AI-driven productivity disinflation eventually allowing a much deeper cutting cycle. In short, the Universal Basic Income that we predicted over two years ago is coming to pay for welfare for the tens of millions soon to be laid off due to AI, is now on its way.
Market pricing so much AI success, it will need to leave about 100 million people without a job.
Bring on the UBI
Last night’s ZeroHedge debate featured the cautiously bullish Adam Parker, former Morgan Stanley chief equity strategist who now runs Trivariate, and bearish money manager Michael Pento, hosted by Adam Taggart of Thoughtful Money.
While Parker is largely optimistic about equities, he put forth a gloomy prediction on gas prices, based on what he is hearing as a consensus on Wall Street. Namely that prices will remain high for at least a year even if Hormuz were to open today.
His full comments below and highlights from last night's debate. Check out the full discussion to hear how both Pento and Parker are positioned going into year-end:
Best case: More pain at the pumpParker warned that oil markets may remain structurally elevated even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens immediately, arguing that current pricing still underestimates how long normalization could take.
“The consensus view is it takes much longer to normalize than what’s in the 12-month forward Brent,” Parker said, noting that forward oil pricing in the high-$70 range likely needs to be revised upward.
“Even if we’ve really truly reached some agreement now, it’ll take several months to get back toward where we were already, maybe a year.”
Parker added that economic damage from the energy spike has likely already occurred, particularly for consumer-facing sectors.
“There’s damage done already to consumer discretionary and staples earnings.”
He argued the bigger debate now is whether equity markets continue looking through the near-term pressure on the assumption conditions eventually improve.
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) May 8, 2026 If Hormuz doesn’t open…Renewed hot Middle East conflict and continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz would quickly mean severe inflation and a likely recession, according to Pento. In other words: stagflation.
“Prolonged conflagration in the Middle East? Well, first of all, that would send CPI up even higher. And that would send interest rates up even higher,” Pento said, warning that much of recent GDP growth has been debt-funded rather than organic cash flow.
“Interest rates are going to go much higher as they follow inflation higher. That could put the kibosh on all this borrowing.”
Pento argued that if oil prices hit $150 per barrel, things go South quickly.
“If oil goes to 150 and stays there or thereabouts, you’ll see stocks drop and you’ll see home prices drop. And that really torpedoes the top 20% purchasing power.”
He added that recession odds rise significantly if oil remains above $100 to $120 “for any kind of duration, a couple of months,” calling it “a big problem for the stock market.”
Meanwhile trading the day-to-day is impossible because “you can get a tweet from Trump telling everybody that things are going great now and we’re about to sign a deal. And then the next thing you know, you turn around, you go to the bathroom, you come back and bombs are being lobbed at ships. It’s that stochastic.”
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) May 8, 2026Watch the full debate below or listen on Spotify.
Watch Now: the ZeroHedge Big Picture Market debate: Adam Parker vs Michael Pento, moderated by Adam Taggarthttps://t.co/rGqcyox7Jy
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 7, 2026 Tyler Durden Fri, 05/08/2026 - 12:20