Update: Alexi Mostrous at Tortoise has managed to track down “Bernd Bergmair” after a search that spanned “China, and Austria, Hong Kong and New York” but that apparently ended somewhere in London. The full story will be online in a podcast on Tortoise on Monday.
One of the fun paradoxes of early internet culture was the concept of the “Googlewhack“: a google search query that returns only a single result. Until today, Bernard Bergemar, the largest owner and biggest beneficiary of MindGeek, the company which owns the world’s most trafficked adult website, would almost qualify.
An astonishing investigation by Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson reveals that MindGeek’s ultimate owner is someone who barely exists on the internet. At the time of writing, he only exists in two court filings from the early 2010s, and in the Financial Times article published today.
Read the full story of MindGeek’s secretive owner at the Financial Times. You won’t be disappointed.