Updated on July 30, 2024
If there is Gandalf and Gandalf the White, why not Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg the White?
Telegram founder Pavel Durov is a strange bird. Like his colleague, the “father” of Facebook, he was born in 1984. He got rich after creating a social network. He, too, managed to pile up a certain number of billions.
Only with some rather significant nuances. Unlike his peer, he speaks fluent Latin, and the photos make it clear that his musculature looks quite different. He made his global breakthrough with an app that guarantees you security and tries not to manipulate you. Not exactly the case with his colleague…
He graduated with every honor imaginable… in philology, even though at the same time he is supposedly a dangerous hacker. He became a celebrity before getting into serious trouble with the authorities in his homeland.
And all the while, to this day, he remains an enigma to the media around the world. Does he have two children, five children, or has he never had a relationship with a woman? And how did it suddenly turn out that he has… 100 children, whom he will try to introduce to one another? What will his next big project be? How does he imagine the future, and is he afraid of artificial intelligence?
“I don’t have land, I don’t have real estate. Nothing. Because for me, the number one priority in life is my freedom.”
Pavel Durov is one of those figures who make today’s tech world far more exciting…
I Came, I Saw, I Conquered
The richest citizen of the United Arab Emirates… we would surely picture a sheikh who has amassed oil-soaked wads of dollars and lately hands them out to aging football stars. But no, it is the young man you see in the photos.
The same one who, having amassed unexpected riches, amused himself with his colleagues by launching folded banknotes like paper airplanes from a St. Petersburg high-rise.
The same one who refused to hand over his users’ data and, for that reason, had to look for a new professional challenge (and a new citizenship).
The creator of two of the most successful online projects in history, a philologist with a gold-medal diploma… which, however, he never went to collect.
To Err Is Human
I must point out that far too little is known about him, so much so that until recently you wouldn’t find fresh posts from him on the big social networks, and we had to wait a long time for his first interview… Before that, he would pop up now and then only on Instagram, with macho photos garnished with life maxims—his own or Marcus Aurelius’s.
Pavel was born in St. Petersburg and started school in Turin, where he studied briefly before returning to his hometown. I call him a “young man” for personal reasons. Both he and Zuckerberg turn 40 this year, and I am on that list too.
Of course, of the three of us, he is the most youthful-looking; wicked tongues say aesthetic surgery has played no small part. Or perhaps, besides being a vegetarian and a libertarian, he simply gets up early and will live to 200?
While I Breathe, I Hope
He was hooked on computers by the age of 11. But he wasn’t the star of the family. His big brother Nikolai, four years older, could read like an adult at just 3 and solve quadratic equations at 8. He went on to win countless olympiads in programming and mathematics and set off down the path of the exact sciences.
Do you still think people are divided into humanities types and science types?
Their father, Valery, is (to this day) a professor, a specialist in Latin and the history of ancient Rome, and our hero followed in his footsteps.
In high school he was placed in an experimental class where every subject was studied in greater depth—including no fewer than four languages, Latin among them. Despite the high bar, Pavel stood out in every subject. He won school competitions in computer science, linguistics and design, and collected a string of scholarships.
If You Want Peace, Prepare for War
He sat at the front desk because of poor eyesight… but don’t picture the “classic nerd.” Around the same time, he managed to remotely change the wallpaper on every school computer to a photo of the computer science teacher captioned “Must die.” His classmates also recall that he was cut off from the school network several times, but he always found a way around the restrictions thanks to his experience with computers.
How exactly the two images combine—the overachieving student and the cyber hooligan… we can only guess.
He then studied English philology (with a focus on Latin) and, as I mentioned, in 2006 earned a diploma with highest honors from St. Petersburg State University, which he has yet to collect.
Life Is Short, Art Is Long
Because by then he already had an idea in his head that seemed to hold enormous possibilities. “When I looked at the people commuting to their offices every day for routine work, I didn’t imagine my life looking like that,” Durov says. “Running internet projects and organizing university events got me used to independence and to the idea of having no direct bosses.”
One of those projects was the university’s online forum, where the future entrepreneur was quite active on all kinds of topics—he later said he often logged in under different nicknames and argued with himself to provoke discussion. Well, apparently that is when he used up his desire to talk about himself. But he did become convinced that online communication could be far more appealing if people spoke under their real names.
Friends told him about a young man at Harvard who had created a network where his fellow students chatted, swapped photos and discussed important topics. Pavel sensed that something similar would be a huge success in Russia and… in a matter of days he built his first successful site, which to this day ranks among the 20 most visited in the world—VKontakte. Yes, today it has nothing to do with its creator, but it proved to be the ideal local solution at exactly the right moment.
At first the platform was to be called Student.ru, but he soon came up with the current name, because “sooner or later we all graduate.” His first collaborator was his brother Nikolai, with whom he built the platform. The first 2,000 users were gathered in just a week with the promise of a prize—an iPad for whoever brought in the most friends.
When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do
The young man quickly turned out to be astonishingly rich. Two of the rare scandals linked to his name date from this period. The notorious story in which Pavel and his colleagues, feeling on top of the world, threw $2,000 in 5,000-ruble banknotes folded into paper airplanes, while a crowd below fought to collect them. Durov later said it had been his unconventional way of marking St. Petersburg’s city day. In the other case, the entrepreneur allegedly bumped a police patrol car with his own… but the sources contradict each other so much about what actually happened that it isn’t even clear whether he was in the area.
Durov sold his last 12 percent of VKontakte’s shares in 2014, because “what you own sooner or later starts to own you.” I think I mentioned he has a soft spot for Marcus Aurelius.
Woe to the Vanquished
His big troubles began in 2014, when he refused to hand over the data of his Ukrainian users to the Russian authorities. Because of this he left his homeland and said he had no intention of returning. Today, by an irony of fate, the two software products he created are more sought after and used than ever in Russia too.
And speaking of the second one—Telegram appeared in August 2013 and gathered a million users in two months. Durov says the idea of a secure, encrypted messaging app came to him the first time special forces burst into his office demanding access to user data. Pavel realized that, at that point, he had no way of talking securely even with his own brother. It was time to build a platform. And it was his brother Nikolai who built it, developing the app’s cryptographic foundations.
The project was kept secret for a long time before it was ready to welcome users. And it experienced a real boom when people began talking more about online security—Telegram became the most downloaded app of 2021.
The Voice of the People Is the Voice of God
“We can’t make messaging technology secure for everybody except terrorists. It’s either secure or it’s not,” says the entrepreneur, who values protected online communication above all else. That is exactly why he chose Dubai as his home, saying he can work there without being harassed by the state.
For many years Durov funded the venture out of his own pocket—no revenue from ads or subscriptions—at a cost of $13 million a year.
Well, he can afford it; he is indulging himself. Today Pavel’s fortune is estimated at $11.5 billion—a far cry from his colleague Zuckerberg, he “barely” makes the global top 500, but he is the richest resident of the Arabian Peninsula and the youngest billionaire in that part of the world. He is also an official citizen of the island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and of France.
Among his newer plans was a blockchain platform with its own cryptocurrency—the gram. Its development attracted an impressive $1.7 billion in investment, but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission refused to license the project, and it had to be abandoned. “The blockchain industry was built on the promise of decentralization, but it ended up concentrated in the hands of a few who began abusing their power,” Durov wrote on the subject.
The Truth Shall Make Us Free
In recent years, nothing has been heard of him taking on a new venture. As we might think from his Instagram profile, perhaps he has given himself over to rest and the pleasures of life. Or is he cooking up something truly big and different? I’d bet on the latter. According to people who know him, the online macho persona is a marketing trick to attract an audience.
“What we do now echoes in eternity”—one of the latest Marcus Aurelius quotes Durov has shared.
“As our civilization becomes more efficient at creating entertainment, at some point it may become too entertaining to still be efficient,” reads one of his recent tweets.
And the one before it: “Some people fear that AI will enslave humanity. But in a sense, it already has—through content recommendation algorithms. How many hours a day do you spend on your devices?”
O Tempora! O Mores!
By all appearances, he is moved by exactly the kinds of topics that make me tell Digital Stories.
Here are a few more strokes to show you just how interesting a character we are dealing with. He says he is inspired by Che Guevara and Steve Jobs. In some interviews he admits to being a committed Zen Buddhist, in others a Pastafarian, a follower of the made-up church that pokes fun at today’s religions. His big hobby is collecting rare ancient coins. He also loves extreme sports—from surfing to freestyle skiing.
On one of his birthdays he said he had long ago given up 7 things that, in his view, have a negative effect on the mind: alcohol, meat, all pharmaceutical products, nicotine, coffee, tea, fast food, sugar and… television, along with all its equivalents. What else is left for him but to crunch vegetables and pose shirtless for Instagram?
Fortune Favors the Bold
As I mentioned, his marital status is unclear. According to his only semi-official biography, he is believed to have married his fellow student Daria while at university and to have had a boy and a girl with her, who should be teenagers by now. And although no one has ever seen them or is sure they exist, they regularly appear in rankings of future wealthy heirs.
His classmates say Daria was then editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, while the prematurely balding Durov was one of the university’s celebrities. One day she stopped him in the hallway and asked for an interview, because he was “such a genius, such a talented and admirable person.”
Also from that time come his famous words at his graduation ball, when asked about his future: “I want to be the totem of the internet!” Well, he managed it, albeit by a rather strange, winding road.
Manol of the Hundred Brothers
You may remember the character by that name from Time of Parting, Anton Donchev’s classic Bulgarian novel about the Ottoman era. Well, Durov is certainly not his father, but… the heading is no accident. Because just when nothing at all was known about Durov’s private life, remarkable news suddenly appeared.
First, the Russian press ran an interview with a woman named Irina Bolgar, who said she had three children with Durov. And that the time had come to tell the truth online, because the children felt bad that nobody knew about them:
But why on earth… are they redheads?
Irina didn’t go into detail about the story of her relationship with Durov. But two days later he himself once again drew all eyes in remarkable fashion, saying that he is in fact… the father of more than 100 children!
“I’ve just been told I have over 100 biological children. How is that possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone?” he wrote on Telegram. He then explained that, at a friend’s suggestion, he had become a sperm donor to help couples who couldn’t have children of their own. Of course, everything happens anonymously, but Durov later added that he would publish his full DNA data so that each of them could look for their brothers and sisters around the world.
The story began 15 years ago, when the friend in question—the head of an IVF clinic—told him there weren’t enough donors and encouraged him to donate as much as he could…
And what do you know—billionaires like Musk and Durov are the ones most visibly and actively looking after the reproduction of humanity?
A Conversation by Request
A little earlier, in April 2024, his first major interview became a big event. It did not, of course, take place in the traditional media, but with the hugely popular and lately much-disputed Tucker Carlson. Durov told his story in detail, broadly confirming everything that was known about him. But he also said quite a few other important things—for instance, that the U.S. government, like every other government, uses technology to spy on people. That “an open back door is a door, no matter who uses it.” That this is precisely the battle that brought him to Dubai—far enough from the powerful of both East and West.
Contrary to his image so far, Durov was quite detailed, sincere, clear… Much more a person of flesh and blood than in his Instagram persona. Or is this, too, just a fashion?!
“I’m an optimist. I believe the world develops in cycles. And if today it seems things are moving in one direction, that doesn’t mean tomorrow they will keep moving the same way.”
He recalls meeting Zuckerberg, to whom he described his ideas, after which Facebook “tried to copy everything. Not what we did, but what I told them. It was funny.” “That’s why I think I shouldn’t do business with Mark Zuckerberg.”
And more: “I don’t have land, I don’t have real estate. Nothing. Because for me, the number one priority in life is my freedom. Once you start buying these things, it ties you to a physical location. I have nothing against people who buy property, but personally, for me, it’s not the answer. I’d rather make decisions that will affect how people communicate than choose the color of the walls in a house that only I, my family and my friends will ever see…”
Freedom… pretty strong words for a tech billionaire. I don’t know about you, but I’d believe he means it. What could be coming next?
