Telegram’s CEO built two dominant social networks from scratch before 40 and has fathered more than 100 biological children. He’s also facing up to 10 years in prison

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Telegram’s CEO built two dominant social networks from scratch before 40 and has fathered more than 100 biological children. He’s also facing up to 10 years in prison

Telegram just announced its first annual profit, raking in $540 million in 2024. Revenues also hit $1.4 billion, up from $343 million a year ago. The company is fully owned by Pavel Durov, the 40-year-old billionaire wunderkind who’s often been called the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, and who also happens to be facing criminal charges right now.

Pavel Durov, the man behind the encrypted messaging service Telegram, is one of the most interesting figures in the world of tech. While he’s often compared to Mark Zuckerberg, given his penchant for launching successful social-media companies, he also has a lot in common with world’s richest man—and

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—Elon Musk.

Durov, like Musk, is a pro-natalist, meaning he is a strong proponent of having more children to populate the planet. Though Durov says he “has never been married and prefers to live alone,” he also announced last July he has “over 100 biological kids.”

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, the billionaire CEO claimed since a friend approached him over 15 years ago to donate ****** so he and his wife could have a baby, he’s now “helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids,” and “at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen ****** available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids.”

Durov is an intriguing and polarizing figure, who has had his fair share of pits and peaks in just 40 years of life.

Pavel Durov was born in October 1984 in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg—though it was Leningrad back then, before the Soviet Union was officially dissolved in 1991.

While Durov’s grandfather

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during World War II, and his

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and faculty head at Saint Petersburg State University, Durov actually spent many years growing up in Turin, Italy, after moving to the Mediterranean country at the age of four.

Durov, like his older brother Nikolai, was a math prodigy. In one of his rare interviews,

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, Durov said he and Nikolai won multiple gold medals at the International Math Olympiad and were featured on Italian television several times to solve cubic equations in real-time.

When his family moved back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, they brought a parting gift from Italy: an

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personal computer. Durov told Carlson that meant he was in “one of the few families in Russia who could actually teach ourselves how to program.”

Durov was a prodigious coder. He built a

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for his university—Saint Petersburg State, the same school where his father worked—while he was a student there. But in 2006, one of his classmates introduced him to

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, which led the pair to create a social network of their own. (A third classmate became the third co-founder.)

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Their creation, VKontakte (also known as

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), launched in September of that year, and amassed a million users just eight months later. Less than a year after that, their user base swelled to 10 million. By December 2008, Durov was the proud operator of Russia’s most popular social network.

Durov reigned as

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’s CEO until April 21, 2014. Just three weeks after an April Fool’s joke gone wrong—Durov submitted his resignation to the board on April 1, but

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—the company removed him as

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’s chief executive.

“Interestingly, the shareholders did not have the courage to do this directly and I learned about my mysterious dismissal from the press,”

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the day he was fired.

Durov, who had a contentious relationship with Russian authorities after refusing several requests to remove opposition politicians’ pages from

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, said at the time his ouster meant the company had been taken over by Vladimir Putin’s allies. Just five days later, on April 26,

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and said he had “no plans to go back” because “the country is incompatible with internet business at the moment.”

During his time as

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’s CEO, Durov had

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. So in 2013, when he was still leading efforts at the social network, he and his brother Nikolai decided to launch a messaging service built on end-to-end encryption, to keep private messages free from government interference. The brothers launched Telegram Messenger in August that year, first for the iPhone, and later for Android devices.

(A year later, Mark Zuckerberg directed

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to buy Whatsapp in a blockbuster $19 billion deal. Durov

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at the time “it doesn’t matter how many messaging apps are out there if all of them *****.”)

After Durov left Russia following his ouster from

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,

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Durov was “moving from country to country every few weeks with a small band of computer programmers. One day he is in Paris, another in Singapore.” Eventually, Durov set up shop with his team in Berlin, Germany, in 2014 before later moving its headquarters to Dubai in 2017. The company says it

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across the world so “no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on a user’s privacy and freedom of expression,” according to a company spokesperson, who also added that Telegram “will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose the individual’s IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities” if a user is a suspect in a criminal case that would violate the app’s terms of service.

Telegram now has one billion users and became profitable for the first time last year. According to

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, after announcing a $173 million loss in 2023 on just $343 million in revenue, the company reported $540 million in profit in 2024 on a whopping $1.4 billion in revenue. Telegram, which has issued about $2.4 billion in bonds over the past four years (and repurchased $375 million worth of them between September and December of last year), the company has also made in-roads with “conversational AI,” partnering with Elon Musk’s xAI to integrate its chatbot, Grok, into the social network.

In August 2024,

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after his private jet landed outside Paris, alleging he enabled and allowed ******** activity— such as drug trafficking, fraud, and child *******-abuse materials— to flow through Telegram. While he was forced to stay in the country at the time, he was finally allowed to leave France in March of this year, albeit temporarily,

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.

Durov faces up to 10 years in prison, if convicted. His criminal case has re-invigorated debate around the extent tech executives should be responsible for the activities that happen on their platforms. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pled guilty in 2024 to money-laundering violations that happened on its crypto platform, and Ross Ulbricht, creator of the ****** market Silk Road, was

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. But while Ulbricht was sentenced to double life in prison, plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole, he was released from prison after serving 12 years in jail, in January 2025, after he received

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by President Trump.

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