In January of this year, Leonid Radvinsky offered sixty percent of OnlyFans for eight billion dollars. Nobody bid.
He died on March 20, at forty-three, after a long illness. Seven weeks later the trustee of the family trust that held his shares sold about sixteen percent of the business to Architect Capital for five hundred and thirty-five million dollars, at a price that valued the whole company at roughly three point one five billion.
Somewhere in the gap between eight billion and three point one five billion sits a date of death.
That gap is not a curiosity. Had this been a Canadian estate it would have been most of the administration, because our system deems a person to have sold everything they owned the moment before they died, at fair market value, and then taxes the gain. For a public company that is a lookup. For a private one it is an argument, conducted in the absence of the only thing that would settle it.
The auction is the useful image, because Radvinsky ran one and it failed. He set a reserve, the room stayed quiet, and he withdrew the lot. An owner is entitled to do that. An estate is not. Nobody accepts “no bid” as a valuation, and an executor who reports a business at whatever the market last refused to pay will find that position very hard to hold.
So what counts as evidence?
The eight billion dollar ask counts for almost nothing. A serious offer to buy tells you something real, because it establishes that a person with money was willing to part with it. An offer to sell that nobody took tells you only that the seller wanted more than anyone would give. It speaks to the ceiling and says nothing whatsoever about the floor.
The Architect sale is the opposite problem. It is a genuine trade, at arm’s length, with a buyer who had been at the table before the death and closed within weeks of it. That is roughly as good as private company evidence ever gets. It is also evidence that did not exist on the date that matters, and valuation is supposed to be a photograph rather than a highlight reel. How much of a transaction seven weeks after a death reflects conditions that already existed, and how much reflects the death itself, is precisely the sort of question that takes four years and two experts and still does not resolve cleanly.
Then there is the wrinkle that makes this interesting rather than merely large.
The only real trade in the window was a minority block. The estate held control. Ordinary valuation logic says its shares should therefore be worth more per share than the sixteen percent Architect bought, because control commands a premium and minority stakes take a discount. Apply that logic and the estate’s number goes up. But the January auction had already tested exactly that proposition. Control was offered to the open market and found no buyer at any price the owner would take. Control that nobody wants is not a premium. It is an overhang.
Which points at something the valuation textbooks handle badly. OnlyFans is hard to sell for reasons that have nothing to do with how it performs, and it performs extremely well. The buyer pool is filtered by something other than price. Lenders will not touch it, institutional money will not be photographed holding it, and the list of purchasers who can write the cheque and absorb the optics is short enough to read aloud.
Canadian practitioners will recognise the shape without recognising the scale. A cannabis retailer whose licence does not survive a change of control. A firearms business whose insurer declines to renew for anyone else. A professional practice sellable only to someone holding the same designation. A contracting company whose entire customer list was really a friendship with the deceased. In every one of these the asset is worth a great deal and can be sold to almost nobody, and the executor still has to write a number down.
Writing it down once is the part people underestimate. That number does not stay in the tax file. It shows up again in the estate accounting, in any dependant’s relief claim, in family law if a surviving spouse’s own affairs are later in issue, and above all in what the beneficiaries come to believe they were owed. Radvinsky’s trustee happens to be lucky, in that her two positions point the same direction. A modest date of death value reduces the tax exposure and simultaneously supports the conclusion that selling weeks later was not improvident. That alignment is a coincidence. It very often runs the other way, and an executor who argued the value down for the taxman finds the argument read back to them by a beneficiary who thinks the business was given away.
We talk about valuation as though it were measurement, a thing discovered by someone sufficiently qualified. It is closer to advocacy. The professional response is therefore less about hiring the right valuator after the fact and more about refusing to leave the number to be discovered at all: an agreement that says how it will be calculated, a freeze that caps it while the business is still small enough to argue about cheaply, insurance sized to the liability rather than to the premium the client wanted to pay. None of that is glamorous. All of it is easier than the alternative.
An auctioneer who cannot find a bid passes the lot and goes home.
An executor is the only person in the room obliged to say a number out loud.