The New Pornographers

Above Acworth’s desk is a framed article from a British tabloid, The Sun, which he picked up by chance while vacationing in Spain in 1997. The headline reads, “Fireman Makes ¼ Million Pounds Pushing Internet Filth.”

“I realized this article was going to change my life,” says Acworth. At that point, he had already earned a mathematics degree from Cambridge, a master’s from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris—one of Europe’s most renowned business schools—and was working toward a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had also worked for a year at Barings Bank in London.

“This guy had simply taken some photos, put them behind a password-protected area and started charging people with credit cards. There was nothing even remotely clever about it. The fact that he could make that amount of money was astonishing. I thought, Do I really want to finish my Ph.D. and end up in a bank?”

Peter Acworth is a bondage enthusiast who started kink.com in 1997 out of his student bedroom while he was a PhD student in New York City. His first models were students at Columbia University, who he paid to be tied up while he tried to conceal his erection! After a huge initial success, he moved to San Francisco and started expanding.