New Book Reveals Porn Industry Bosses: From a Goldman Sachs Banker to French Twins Untouched by Regulation

Patricia Nilsson, a Financial Times business journalist, reveals who really controls the world's pornography empire in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else. Over five years, she dissected an industry that had escaped public scrutiny for decades, analyzing it much like the oil and gas market. The result: the owners of the biggest platforms are no longer flamboyant moguls like Larry Flynt or Hugh Hefner, but bankers and tech workers who choose to hide behind layered corporate structures.

Nilsson found that Bernd Bergmair, owner of MindGeek—the conglomerate behind Pornhub—from 2013 to 2023, was a former Goldman Sachs investment banker from Austria. Bergmair even wrote an undergraduate thesis on corporate acquisition financing strategies and had no understanding of the ins and outs of the sex industry. "He knew it was a very profitable business and only cared about making sure the structure was safe so he could keep drawing dividends," Nilsson wrote. In 2020, Pornhub removed millions of unverified videos, some allegedly containing nonconsensual content, rape, and sexual violence.

Beyond Bergmair, Nilsson hunted down the owners of WebGroup Czech Republic (WGCZ), the company behind Penthouse, which has an office in Prague with no signboard. The company is owned by Stéphane and Malorie Pacaud, French twins in their 40s who occasionally appear on France's richest list yet have managed to avoid the spotlight. "It's very hard to know who is pulling the strings," Nilsson said, adding that law enforcement against one site only brings out 15 twin sites from different jurisdictions.

More worryingly, Nilsson said, the porn industry's business model has seeped into the entire digital landscape. High-quality video streaming technology, algorithms that keep users lingering, and the culture of hustling and monetizing one's own image—all trace back to innovations developed by porn companies since the 1990s. "Staring at content engineered by algorithms to arouse is a perfect metaphor for our relationship with devices and social media," she said. Social media, too, copied porn's tactics to make content feeds addictive.

"Pornography is no longer just about sex—its logic of capturing attention through stimulation, making us watch instead of act, has become embedded in the online world," Nilsson said.

Nilsson also highlights how online rage and extreme content stem from competition for clicks on porn platforms. When free material floods the market, content must become ever more shocking to stand out—a trend that then spread across internet culture at large. She calls this phenomenon the internet's "masturbatory" model, which feeds users content to make them feel comfortable, aroused, and scrolling endlessly.

In the Indonesian context, Nilsson's findings are relevant to rising consumption of explicit content and the normalization of self-exposure on social media. Pornography regulation in the country still focuses on blocking sites, while complex global ownership structures make it hard for law enforcement to reach the real actors. Phenomena such as financial domination, camming, and subscription platforms are also beginning to reach Indonesian online sex workers, who often get trapped in a gig economy without adequate legal protection. The question of who profits from this business model is becoming ever more urgent.

Nilsson refuses to judge sex workers. "If we really want to support sex workers, their accounts of what the work means should be central to the conversation," she said. Instead, she questions why more women are choosing this path, and what that says about the state of capitalism today—when wages from formal work are no longer enough to buy a house. Going forward, the question is not only how to regulate pornography, but how society responds to an economic logic that has changed the way we work, consume, and interact in the digital world.