- Telegram simply introduced its first annual revenue, raking in $540 million in 2024. Revenues additionally hit $1.4 billion, up from $343 million a 12 months in the past. The corporate is absolutely owned by Pavel Durov, the 40-year-old billionaire wunderkind who’s usually been known as the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, and who additionally occurs to be dealing with legal costs proper now.
Pavel Durov, the person behind the encrypted messaging service Telegram, is likely one of the most fascinating figures on the earth of tech. Whereas he’s usually in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg, given his penchant for launching profitable social-media corporations, he additionally has so much in frequent with world’s richest man—and fellow free-speech absolutist—Elon Musk.
Durov, like Musk, is a pro-natalist, which means he’s a powerful proponent of getting extra kids to populate the planet. Although Durov says he “has never been married and prefers to live alone,” he additionally introduced final July he has “over 100 biological kids.” In a Telegram put up, the billionaire CEO claimed since a good friend approached him over 15 years in the past to donate sperm so he and his spouse might have a child, he’s now “helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids,” and “at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids.”
Durov is an intriguing and polarizing determine, who has had his justifiable share of pits and peaks in simply 40 years of life.
A math and coding prodigy
Pavel Durov was born in October 1984 in Russia’s second-largest metropolis, St. Petersburg—although it was Leningrad again then, earlier than the Soviet Union was formally dissolved in 1991.
Whereas Durov’s grandfather served within the Soviet Crimson Military throughout World Conflict II, and his father was a scholar and school head at Saint Petersburg State College, Durov really spent a few years rising up in Turin, Italy, after shifting to the Mediterranean nation on the age of 4.
Durov, like his older brother Nikolai, was a math prodigy. In one in every of his uncommon interviews, a 2024 sit-down with Tucker Carlson, Durov mentioned he and Nikolai gained a number of gold medals on the Worldwide Math Olympiad and had been featured on Italian tv a number of occasions to unravel cubic equations in real-time.
When his household moved again to Russia after the autumn of the Soviet Union, they introduced a parting reward from Italy: an IBM private pc. Durov informed Carlson that meant he was in “one of the few families in Russia who could actually teach ourselves how to program.”
The Mark Zuckerberg of Russia
Durov was a prodigious coder. He constructed a widespread discussion board for his college—Saint Petersburg State, the identical faculty the place his father labored—whereas he was a scholar there. However in 2006, one in every of his classmates launched him to Fb, which led the pair to create a social community of their very own. (A 3rd classmate turned the third co-founder.)
Their creation, VKontakte (also called VK), launched in September of that 12 months, and amassed one million customers simply eight months later. Lower than a 12 months after that, their person base swelled to 10 million. By December 2008, Durov was the proud operator of Russia’s hottest social community.
Durov reigned as VK’s CEO till April 21, 2014. Simply three weeks after an April Idiot’s joke gone unsuitable—Durov submitted his resignation to the board on April 1, however insisted it was solely meant as a joke—the corporate eliminated him as VK’s chief government.
“Interestingly, the shareholders did not have the courage to do this directly and I learned about my mysterious dismissal from the press,” Durov wrote on VK the day he was fired.
Durov, who had a contentious relationship with Russian authorities after refusing a number of requests to take away opposition politicians’ pages from VK, mentioned on the time his ouster meant the corporate had been taken over by Vladimir Putin’s allies. Simply 5 days later, on April 26, Durov left Russia and mentioned he had “no plans to go back” as a result of “the country is incompatible with internet business at the moment.”
The creation of Telegram
Throughout his time as VK’s CEO, Durov had a number of run-ins with the federal government. So in 2013, when he was nonetheless main efforts on the social community, he and his brother Nikolai determined to launch a messaging service constructed on end-to-end encryption, to maintain non-public messages free from authorities interference. The brothers launched Telegram Messenger in August that 12 months, first for the iPhone, and later for Android units.
(A 12 months later, Mark Zuckerberg directed Fb to purchase Whatsapp in a blockbuster $19 billion deal. Durov informed TechCrunch‘s Mike Butcher on the time “it doesn’t matter how many messaging apps are out there if all of them suck.”)
After Durov left Russia following his ouster from VK, The New York Instances reported 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.” Ultimately, Durov arrange store along with his group in Berlin, Germany, in 2014 earlier than later shifting its headquarters to Dubai in 2017. The corporate says it spreads its servers internationally so “no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on a user’s privacy and freedom of expression,” in line with an organization spokesperson, who additionally 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 person is a suspect in a legal case that may violate the app’s phrases of service.
Telegram now has one billion customers and have become worthwhile for the primary time final 12 months. In keeping with The Monetary Instances, after saying a $173 million loss in 2023 on simply $343 million in income, the corporate reported $540 million in revenue in 2024 on a whopping $1.4 billion in income. Telegram, which has issued about $2.4 billion in bonds over the previous 4 years (and repurchased $375 million value of them between September and December of final 12 months), the corporate has additionally made in-roads with “conversational AI,” partnering with Elon Musk’s xAI to combine its chatbot, Grok, into the social community.
Authorized bother
In August 2024, French authorities detained Durov after his non-public jet landed exterior Paris, alleging he enabled and allowed criminal activity— comparable to drug trafficking, fraud, and baby sexual-abuse supplies— to movement via Telegram. Whereas he was compelled to remain within the nation on the time, he was lastly allowed to depart France in March of this 12 months, albeit quickly, to go to Dubai.
Durov faces as much as 10 years in jail, if convicted. His legal case has re-invigorated debate across the extent tech executives ought to be chargeable for the actions that occur on their platforms. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pled responsible in 2024 to money-laundering violations that occurred on its crypto platform, and Ross Ulbricht, creator of the black market Silk Street, was convicted of utilizing the web to facilitate a legal enterprise. However whereas Ulbricht was sentenced to double life in jail, plus 40 years, with out the potential for parole, he was launched from jail after serving 12 years in jail, in January 2025, after he obtained a full and unconditional pardon by President Trump.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
