Joey Sacco was 19, bored, and did what a lot of teens do without thinking too much about it: filmed himself and sent it to a girl. Unfortunately, the video got passed around further than he ever intended, and some people even tried to sell it. At the time, Sacco wasn’t ashamed. And now at 26, his take is “if anyone’s going to make money off my body, it’s me.” Seven years and one very lucrative picot later, that’s exactly what is happening.
Sacco is the son of the family behind Sack O’ Subs, a Jersey Shore hoagie institution, and a former Ocean City High basketball star who went to Vassar. His internet career started innocently enough. In December 2022, a TikTok of him roasting difficult hoagie shop customers, filmed with his sister Grace, pulled in six million views. More skits followed, one hitting 13 million. Followers piled up across platforms: nearly half a million on TikTok, over 100,000 on X, 120,000 on Instagram. Somewhere in the shirtless, booty-hugging shorts phase of his content, Sacco noticed the comments skewed heavily toward gay men. So he did what any savvy creator would do: he ran the numbers and made the decision to open an OnlyFans. It launched in January 2025, and within two days he made more than what he was being paid at his full-time accounting job each year. He quickly quit that job and focused on growing his account. His current subscriber base is roughly 98 percent gay men, and with around 7,000 subscribers, he reportedly nets more than seven figures a year. Now he needs to hire an accountant instead of working as one.
Sacco is candid that his sexuality is “exploring,” a framing that may be honest but is also strategically vague. One collaboration video with a male costar runs an extra $100 to unlock, which is either genuine self-discovery or a very well-monetized tease. And his account isn’t a secret. His family knows, and his sister’s response to potential backlash is refreshingly unbothered. Customers upset about it are welcome to buy their hoagies anywhere else.
What’s interesting about Sacco’s story isn’t the hoagie angle, the family support, or that a misguided video he made as a teen inspired him. It’s that nobody is out there writing think pieces about what his success says about the moral decline of Jersey Shore youth. There are no articles questioning if he was exploited at 19 or if his family should be embarrassed. No Substacks asking if his choices reflect some deeper crisis of masculinity. Instead, he gets profiled as a hustler. As someone who spotted a market inefficiency and capitalized on it, playing the long game while all the other suckers are stuck at their desk jobs. Sacco even frames it that way, saying his OnlyFans income is his freedom from ever needing a “normal job.”
It’s a far cry from how most women on OnlyFans are written about. Sure, there are some girl boss angles about the big names on the platform. But there are many who are out there making even more than Sacco, some who followed a very similar trajectory, who are written about as cautionary tales. They aren’t applauded for their business acumen; they are asked what’s wrong with them for making such a decision. There are hundreds of op-eds about exploitation, family shame narrated for her rather than by her, and endless speculation about what led her there instead of the straight-up admiration for the empire she’s built. Sacco’s own logic, that nobody is forcing his subscribers to pay so why should their desire be his problem, is exactly what women in the industry have been saying for years. But nobody was listening.