The Most Powerful Man in Porn? Meet Prague’s Porn Pharaoh

Paul May (Investigace.cz)
Illustration: Lenka Matoušková 2025-09-09

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Prague has been Europe’s unofficial porn capital for decades. Hundreds of films are shot there each year, giving the city more porn stars per capita than anywhere else. For the past 20 years, one company and one man has dominated Europe’s porn industry — buying up major studios, building platforms, and attracting more web traffic than most global sites. Now, new legislation threatens its business. Investigace.cz dug into company filings to uncover who Stéphane Pacaud is, what WebGroup Czech Republic does, and whether new laws could end his platform’s dominance.

Arguably the most important man in porn has kept a very low profile in Prague for the last two decades. A French citizen, Stéphane Pacaud, established his first company in Prague, WebGroup Czech Republic, in 2013. The company’s most well-known product is the adult content website XVideos, but Pacaud’s activities spread from hiring models, film production, to real estate acquisitions. Considering the significance and magnitude of his business, little is known about the man himself.

His secrecy about his whereabouts and holdings are notorious. He has registered addresses all over the world, and his family members, who once profited from the company, have since departed from it.

There may soon be a more dramatic change: new laws in the EU and the US, particularly on age verification, threaten the future of his vast enterprise.

WebGroup Czech Republic, or WGCZ, is the main company of Stéphane Pacaud, whose Czech conglomerate is composed of fourteen companies under his direct ownership, with more companies indirectly related. Precisely how much he has profited from this company, which has bought many important studios and brands in the industry, is still unknown. The limited filings that are available show revenues of hundreds of millions of euros. His companies film and produce pornography in the building he acquired for the purpose, in the very centre of Prague near Wenceslas square. We know that he owns and has sold valuable properties in the Czech Republic, as have other members of the conglomerate.

Pacaud owned Hotel Praha in a well known ski resort town Špindlerův Mlýn, via two Czech companies, with Stéphane Michael Pacaud being the listed beneficial owner since 2019. Further, in the Czech Cadastre of Real Estate, we see that he is recorded as owning three apartment units in Prague. The director of WebGroup Czech Republic is Czech-Canadian Robert William Seifert, who also owns multiple apartments in Prague.

Pacaud’s company sold Hotel Praha for almost 180 million Czech crowns in November 2022 to a company whose ultimate beneficial owner is Tomáš Čupr, a Czech billionaire. The property is now, however, owned by the Czech investment group PENTA, via another company. Photo: Google Street View

Small Beginnings

Stéphane Michaël Pacaud grew up in Le Creusot, a small town in Saône-et-Loire, in central-eastern France. According to a 2024 investigation by Le Journal de Saône-et-Loire, he and his twin sister Malorie were born there in September 1978. He finished his baccalaureate diploma in social sciences and economics in 1996. He reportedly played Magic: The Gathering in class, read widely, called school lessons boring, and was, according to his friends, a heavy gamer, sociable, and passionate about philosophy, receiving an “exceptional” grade for philosophy in his baccalaureate. Their mother, Madeleine Grocq, was reportedly a singer who performed locally and who in later life set up a driving school. The family reportedly struggled financially, and she died in 2009.

The same reporting places him in the Paris-area into the early 2000s, and company addresses were reported to be registered all over France, but also (along with his twin sister) on a barge, moored in Auxerre on the Yonne River. It is not known whether Stéphane lived on the barge.

From Cybersquatting in the Philippines to Settling in the Czech Republic

Evidence for domain squatting settlements from 2007 shows Pacaud as registered in Makati, in the Philippines. He was alleged to have squatted domain names for profit by registering domain names similar to well known brands in order to attract web traffic. He acquired “mysodexhoapps.com” after the Sodexho Alliance, a French catering multinational, allowed its domain name to expire. According to the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) lodged a complaint, Pacaud’s response was excoriating: “all that for a pathetic, worthless name…you are pathetic.” WIPO ordered the transfer of the domain name back to Sodexho Alliance. Other addresses according to the domain register were established by Pacaud in Manila and France, and other documents also show Hong Kong or Rudolfstetten, Switzerland.

Pacaud first registered a company in the Czech Republic in 2013, though it is not known precisely when Pacaud arrived in Prague. He established a home for his businesses in the city centre on Krakovska street, from where his Czech business empire is still conducted today. For the last two decades, many porn studios of notoriety operated there.

The website XVideos itself was created in 2006, first with Stéphane Pacaud’s name and an address in Montcenis, France, and a year later with his twin sister Malorie name on the registration. She was part of the business from the very start and was listed as a director in several companies in the Pacaud empire. Between 2021-22, she appears to have left all of the Czech companies, and along with another French citizen, Marjorie Grocq, she now runs companies specializing in real estate investment in France. Grocq also held a position in eleven companies of the WGCZ conglomerate, but has likewise vacated these roles. According to local reporting, she is the first cousin of the Pacaud twins.

Both Malorie, who now uses a different surname, and Marjorie still retained a share in the WGCZ conglomerate via the investment holding company LK Management Limited based in Hong Kong, until the middle of 2023. As of May 2025 they remain co-directors of the Hong Kong company, which had minority shares in several companies in the WGCZ group, up until June 2023.

According to a filing in the French registry from 2017, Grocq’s company LKM Services had the Hong Kong company as its sole shareholder.

At its formation in 2012, the Hong Kong company had another 49% shareholder, a Julien LeMarquis with the same address listed as Malorie Pacaud – on the small Caribbean island of Anguilla. One company in the WGCZ conglomerate also had between 2013 and 2015 a company in the British Virgin Islands as its majority shareholder.

Stéphane Pacaud, meanwhile, discontinued his Czech residency, per the land register, but it’s not clear when. He removed his address from the company register in 2024.

Why Porn in Prague?

The Czech Republic – and Prague in particular – has a long history with the adult entertainment industry. After the fall of communism, Czechoslovakia opened up to Western businesses, and by the early noughties, due to its limited censorship, Prague had a large number of foreign producers contributing to the hundreds of movies shot per year in the capital. Prague attracted many American and Western European porn makers – drawn by the city’s low costs and the ready supply of young talent from Czechia and neighboring Slovakia and Hungary. With 138 pornstars for every million people, the Czech Republic still has the highest numbers of porn stars per capita in the world.

Investigace.cz spoke to a glamor photographer in the industry, Paul Batterbury, to ask why Prague was so attractive for pornographers. “There were two British porn photographers 20 years ago or more, both now dead. One made his money with a magazine called Seventeen – which doesn’t run any more, for obvious reasons – and another who ended up working for a larger, well-known American studio called Twisties. They ended up setting the standard for prices for the shoots, which were very reasonable, 250-300 euros. Prague was the place to be. The girls were natural, professional. The language barrier helps, there’s no gossip between you and the models.”

The podcaster Tommie McDonald, who worked as a porn producer in Europe throughout the previous two decades, agrees that the models were a big part of the reason for the industry’s growth in the region. “You can objectively compare the model quality coming out of Eastern European countries. Most models actually looked like fashion or glamor models. They didn’t look like pornstars.”

How did they make porn attractive to the models? “They told them a big lie: that the videos are only for the Western market and their families would never know. As internet porn replaced DVDs and VHS, most companies blocked their websites in Eastern European countries so they can “show” models the site is blocked, and that they can shoot safely in the knowledge that their friends and families would never find out.”

“Of course, it was all bullshit,” McDonald said. “Their families would always find out, even in the DVD days. When the models do get caught it either ruins their lives and they quit, or it ruins their lives and they figure why not carry on?”

A number of big porn productions moved to Hungary. The rates went up. There were three major agencies to work with, versus perhaps 10 in Prague. “But in Hungary they will add a 60 percent extra markup on what the model was actually charging,” explains Batterbury. The fees mean that they will charge 1200-1400 euros for a model for one scene, and for the same model in the Czech Republic it would be more like 800 euros. And they will justify the fees with taxes – but you have no idea whether they are actually putting through the tax on their books.”

Batterbury says the migration back to the Czech Republic in recent years is likely due in part to these fees. “In Prague the agencies are smaller and more independent, and the fees are at least 25 percent lower.”

McDonald said that the producers in Budapest were very violent towards the models, which is why they would quit the industry fast. “There is a lot less violent abuse in Prague. Over time that’s become the main hub. Most Eastern European countries clamped down on the porn industry. Notice how there are almost no Slovakian, Croatian or Polish porn models. Russia also clamped down on the porn industry and there was an exodus from Russia (the main supplier of European porn models as they were the cheapest).”

A recent report on criminality in the porn industry from the French Ministry for Gender speculates that the basis for the thriving porn industry in Prague is that it profits from the disparities between legislation in the Czech Republic and elsewhere and the precarity of certain populations in countries of Eastern Europe.

The report itself has been decried by the owner of Pornbiz.com (“a blog about the porn business and making money with XVideos/XNXX”), which is hyperlinked directly from Pacaud’s XVideos and is hosted on the same IP address.

How Does WebGroup Czech Republic Make Money?

The exterior of the building where the majority of the businesses owned by Pacaud are headquartered. Photo: Paul May

According to their filings, the main business of WebGroup Czech Republic is running websites with adult content. The main sites, XVideos and XNXX, operate as “tube sites,” offering free videos uploaded by users or studios, monetized through ads and premium subscriptions.

The Pacauds and WGCZ are famous for XVideos, their most recognizable brand and most heavily trafficked website. But they also have a second, nearly identical site, XNXX. The sites are mostly indistinguishable except for minor interface and styling changes, but each receive between 600 million and over a billion visits per month. When the traffic figures are combined, Pacaud’s empire can be argued to have been ahead of all competitors in the entire porn industry in terms of what he has direct ownership and control of.

The ad provider, Traffic F, s.r.o., another Czech company owned by Stéphane Pacaud, claims to provide 6 billion ad views per day. Their latest annual report is from 2020 and lists their net turnover at €97.8 million (2.4 billion CZK).

In order to adapt to a changing market and the success of Onlyfans, WGCZ set up SHEER.com, linking to it directly from the XVideos website. Sheer resembles OnlyFans in that it is a “creator-led” model: operating through pure subscription services and enfranchises individual performers to build direct relationships with fans and monetize personalized content. According to one XVideos user in 2023, XVideos support told them that “soon it won’t be possible to [upload to] XVideos without Sheer.”

Pacaud and WGCZ also own multiple porn production companies, websites, studios and brands, all catering to different porn niches and fetishes. An oft-cited valuation from the French website Challenge suggests his and his sister’s net worth to be over €600 million, without revealing how they arrive at this estimate.

Part of Pacaud’s strategy has been, in recent years, to acquire major studios. Famously, he acquired Penthouse (an American brand with similar recognition to Playboy in the U.S.) for $11.2 million at a bankruptcy auction on June 4, 2018, but many well-known studios have found themselves under the Czech Webgroup umbrella in recent years. Le Monde recently revealed that Pacaud had acquired Jacquie et Michel, a controversial studio accused of coercing individuals into painful, non-consensual acts during shoots. Pacaud and WGCZ are also now the beneficiary of multiple Hungarian firms (Egyzxy Ltd and Kozozxy Ltd) as well as Romanian businesses via this takeover.

Pacaud’s Czech companies appear to operate with somewhat more public disclosure than the people behind the other dominant porn sites, such as Pornhub (formerly MindGeek) or xHamster. In Czech registry filings, he is named outright as the “skutečný majitel” (beneficial owner) of Web Group Czech Republic (WGCZ).

While there are multiple relevant filings for WebGroup Czech Republic, a number of companies in the group are not up-to-date, some having not filed for multiple years, meaning there isn’t a clear picture of the company income. However, there is evidence of significant tax contributions made in the Czech Republic. The company that owns apartments in the building where the majority of the group’s activities are conducted filed €374,000 (9,183,000 CZK) as net turnover, and paid income tax of €18,700 (460,000 CZK) in 2023.

That same year, the highest earning entity, WebGroup Czech Republic a.s., filed net turnover of €130.7 million (3.2 billion CZK), on which it paid €5.6 million (137 million CZK) in income tax. In 2023, the only companies in the group the registry has filings for show a combined net turnover of €158 million (3.88 billion CZK) and a total of €5.8 million (142.3 million CZK) paid in income tax.

Paul May

Paul May is an ICA-trained anti-money laundering expert and a reporter at the Czech Center for Investigative Journalism, investigace.cz.