The tired old advice for women chasing wealth used to be simple: marry a banker. And that sentiment hasn’t gone away. Just last summer a TikTok sound went viral after a woman recorded herself singing a short satirical song that started with, “Looking for a man in finance.” And while she may have been joking, many people who used the sound were very serious.
But unlike those women, Skylar Mae decided to skip the middleman. Well, to skip the man entirely.
The 21-year-old OnlyFans star, who once bragged she made $800,000 in a single day, has turned her X-rated hustle into something Wall Street-adjacent: a self-taught career in finance.
“I wake up at five a.m. to read charts,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll sit there for five hours. Stocks can crash at any moment—you have to stay on top of it.” Most people scroll Instagram before breakfast. Mae scrolls candlestick graphs.
Perhaps it’s because Mae didn’t come from money. Her gateway wasn’t a finance bro in a Patagonia vest but her grandfather, a lifelong day trader. When her OnlyFans windfall landed her with a staggering tax bill, she called him. He explained the basics. She doubled her first investment. The hook was set.
“I make six figures a month, so I feel secure putting big sums in,” she says. “Once I invested $100,000 and made $1.2 million in a day. It was insane. But I’ve also had big losses. You always want to invest only what you’re okay losing.”
That’s the paradox of her world: explicit content pays the bills, but the real adrenaline hit comes from watching numbers turn green on a trading screen.
While Mae’s subscribers expected NSFW selfies, some also get the chance to swap stock tips. Hedge fund guys DM her daily, comparing notes on potential wins. “It’s just fun,” she says. “A different connection than the adult industry—more real life.”
She estimates five to eight fans talk finance with her regularly. “Some of the stocks I’ve mentioned have made them money. They never say how much they invested, and I never say how much I put in. But it’s a mutual win. It’s like a hobby we share.”
In a world where “fan engagement” usually means sexting scripts, Mae has managed to turn OnlyFans into a hybrid of trading floor and fantasy.
Mae isn’t shy about calling out her peers. “Ninety-five percent of the girls I meet in this industry just let their money sit in a bank account,” she says. “I always tell them: take five or ten percent and put it into a dividend stock, or hand it to a broker for the top 500. You don’t have to day trade, but at least make your money grow.”
She’s learned her own lessons the hard way. Early on, she kept reinvesting everything and ended up breaking even. Now she lives by a mantra: always take profit. “Pull out what you put in and a little extra. Reinvest the rest. That way you’re always winning.”
Mae isn’t just cashing in on attention from OnlyFans; she’s compounding it.