Peter Thomas Acworth (born 12 October 1970) is a British web entrepreneur based in San Francisco and the founder of Kink.com, the internet pornography company that became synonymous with professionally produced BDSM and fetish video in the broadband era. The San Francisco Bay Guardian summarized his guiding principles as “intimate, conversational, playful, and mutually enjoyable interactions,” and Acworth has said a product line should grow from “an individual’s actual fantasies.” For adult and kink audiences he is less a performer-first celebrity than the architect of a studio system that standardized public-facing consent talk, site niches, and armory-scale production.
Education and Entry Into Porn
Acworth was born in Derbyshire to a sculptor and a Jesuit priest. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and management at HEC Paris. He entered pornography while a PhD student in finance at Columbia University after reading a British tabloid story about a firefighter who made £250,000 quickly with an internet porn site. With a lifelong interest in bondage, he aimed his site at BDSM. The first property, Hogtied, licensed content from other bondage producers. He soon left graduate school to run the business full-time.
From Hogtied to Kink.com
In 1998 he moved from New York City to San Francisco. When sales flattened because competitors used the same licensed libraries, he began shooting original content—initially performing himself with models found via Craigslist and photographer friends. In 2000 he launched a second site, Fucking Machines, under Cybernet Entertainment, Inc., the corporate entity behind Hogtied.com. More niche sites followed. In 2006 he rebranded the corporation as Kink.com, locking the house name to the subcultural keyword that defined the brand worldwide.
The San Francisco Armory
Late in 2006 Acworth announced purchase of the San Francisco Armory as corporate headquarters and film studio. He sold Kink.com’s then office at 942 Mission Street for $6.5 million—more than double what he had paid four years earlier. The San Francisco Business Times noted large profits he had also made on a Marina home and Hogtied’s original 8th Street studios since arriving in 1998. He told the paper he would not buy more San Francisco real estate: “All of our real estate profits are in the Armory.” Local protest met the porn studio’s arrival in the landmark, but the San Francisco Chronicle later summarized that Acworth “eventually won praise for the restoration work he did on the brick Moorish castle, which had long been empty.” In 2018 the building sold for $65 million after several years of revenue decline at Kink.com—closing a chapter in which one of the world’s most visible BDSM brands occupied a literal fortress.
Leadership, Performance, and Legal Noise
As of 2008 he still performed occasionally in Kink.com projects while serving as CEO. In 2018 longtime associate Alison Boden replaced him as CEO so he could pursue personal projects; he returned as CEO in 2021. In February 2013 he was arrested for obstruction of justice after allegedly delaying police investigating reports of firearms fired in the Armory’s historic shooting range; officers also found about a gram of cocaine on him, adding a possession charge. All charges were later dropped.
Why Acworth Matters on a BDSM Map
Kink.com’s model—niche sites, on-camera negotiation aesthetics, professional bondage and fetish production, and San Francisco industrial scale—shaped how millions of viewers first saw “ethical-looking” BDSM porn. Related cultural objects include the documentary Kink (2013) and interviews such as “The Kink Kronikles.” Whether one praises the studio’s consent theater or criticizes industrial porn’s labor politics, Acworth remains the founder name attached to the most famous BDSM web brand of the 2000s and 2010s: Cambridge math, Columbia finance dropout, Hogtied experimenter, Armory landlord, and intermittent CEO of the company that made “kink” a global URL.
