A journalist pulls back the curtain on the shadowy financiers and tech elite running the world’s top porn sites.
When the glossy images of silk pajamas and swimming-wear-clad assistants first made headlines, figures such as Larry Flynt of Hustler and Hugh Hefner of Playboy were household names. Their public personas suggested a flamboyant, almost romantic view of the adult-entertainment trade.
Today, that image has evaporated. The men who once called the shots have retreated into anonymity, preferring the safety of obscurity over media spotlight.
The rise of an invisible elite
Patricia Nilsson, a dual-British-Swedish journalist with Polish roots, spent five years dissecting the adult-content market for the Financial Times.
In her book Guilty Pleasure she writes, “Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling.” She adds, “These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.” Nilsson’s investigation traced the ownership of MindGeek the conglomerate behind Pornhub, to an Austrian former Goldman Sachs banker named Bernd Bergmair.
From 2013 to 2023 Bergmair steered the world’s largest pornography company while remaining a ghost to the industry, described by peers as an “uncle type” in expensive clothes who knew little about the actual sex-work side of the business.
Bergmair’s background spanned Frankfurt, London, New York and Hong Kong, yet his interest lay solely in financial architecture. “He seemed entirely uninterested in the sex [work] that underpinned the empire he was buying,” Nilsson notes. His strategy was straightforward: secure a lucrative corporate structure, collect dividends, and stay invisible. In 2020 Pornhub removed millions of unverified videos amid allegations of non-consensual content, a move that highlighted the platform’s massive scale and the difficulty of policing such a vast service.
WebGroup Czech Republic and the twin entrepreneurs
Continuing her quest, Nilsson travelled to Prague to investigate the owners of WebGroup Czech Republic (WGCZ) the obscurely named company that runs the Penthouse network and distributes content to hundreds of millions. The French twins Stéphane and Malorie Pacaud both in their forties, own the firm. Though occasionally listed among France’s wealthiest, they have deliberately kept a low profile, operating from nondescript offices that hide the true scale of their empire. Nilsson explains, “One of the reasons it’s still so hard today to regulate pornography is because you crack down on one site, and suddenly there are 15 other copycat sites coming from different jurisdictions.” This fragmentation makes it nearly impossible for regulators to pinpoint who is pulling the strings.
In 2023, a Canadian private-equity group called Ethical Capital Partners acquired MindGeek, rebranding it as Aylo. The company’s ownership matrix grew even more opaque, leaving observers uncertain about who controls the “one-way mirror that is watching, learning from and reshaping our sexuality.” Nilsson argues that this lack of transparency shields the industry from public hearings and accountability.
Tech, traffic and the new business model
The modern porn empire is no longer driven by producers of erotic content but by engineers, traffic specialists and payment-processing experts. Nilsson observed, “I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn’t find anyone who actually worked with porn. I couldn’t find anyone who even knew someone who worked with porn, because all these people were working in [web] traffic or payment processing.” The sector pioneered high-speed video streaming, glitch-free camming technology, and sophisticated recommendation algorithms long before social media platforms adopted similar techniques.
These innovations have seeped into the broader internet experience. The same algorithms that serve users videos designed to arouse also keep them scrolling on platforms unrelated to adult content. Nilsson describes this as the “masturbatory” model of the internet: a loop where content is engineered to “make us feel good, to arouse us, to flatter us, to make us linger.” She emphasizes that the logic of capturing attention through stimulation now underpins everything from news feeds to e-commerce.
While Nilsson’s focus remains on the business structure rather than the lived experiences of performers, she does highlight a paradox. Some webcam models report empowerment and financial independence, while others feel trapped and homesick, as she witnessed in a Prague conference where a depressed cam-model confessed, “I don’t want to be here, I miss home, I made a mistake.” This tension illustrates the complex social landscape that the hidden owners profit from while remaining invisible.
