Before the age of 40, Telegram CEO built two dominant social networks from scratch, giving birth to over 100 biological children. He also faces prisons of up to 10 years

• It’s just announced by Telegram The first annual profit to win $540 million in 2024. Revenues also reached $1.4 billion, up from $343 million a year ago. The company is entirely owned by Pavel Durov, a 40-year-old billionaire Wonderkind, who is often referred to as Russian Mark Zuckerberg, who happens to be facing criminal charges.

Pavel Durov, the man behind the encrypted messaging service Telegram, is one of the most interesting figures in the tech world. He often compares to Mark Zuckerberg and, given his preference to launching successful social media companies, he has many in common with the world’s wealthiest man. Absolute fellow free things– Elon Musk.

Durov, like a mask, is a pronatalist. In other words, he is a strong supporter of having more children than he lives on the planet. Durov says he has never been married and prefers to live alone, but last July announced that he has “more than 100 biological children.” With a telegram postThe billionaire CEO claimed that he and his wife could have a baby since a friend approached him to donate sperm more than 15 years ago. He now “helped over 100 couples in 12 countries to have children,” and “at least one IVF clinic still has frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have children.”

Durov is an intriguing polarized figure, having a significant portion of his pits and peaks in just 40 years of life.

Mathematics and coding genius

Pavel Durov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, in October 1984, before the Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, but at the time it was Leningrad.

Doloff’s grandfather Served the Soviet Red Army During World War II, and he My father was a scholar And Doloff, the faculty chair at St. Petersburg State University, grew up in Turin, Italy for many years after moving to a Mediterranean country at the age of four.

Durov, like his older brother Nikolai, was a mathematics genius. In one of his rare interviews, 2024 sit-in with Tucker CarlsonDurov said he and Nikolai won multiple gold medals in the International Mathematics Olympiad and were featured several times on Italian television to solve the cubic equation in real time.

When his family returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they brought a farewell gift from Italy: IBM Personal computer. Durov told Carlson “He is one of the few families in Russia and can actually teach himself how to program himself.”

Russian Mark Zuckerberg

Doloff was an incredible coder. He made a Popular forums He was a student there because of his university (Petersburg), the same school where his father worked. However, in 2006, one of his classmates introduced him to Facebook, and the pair began to create their own social networks. (My third classmate became my third co-founder.)

Their creation, Vkontakte (also known as VK), was launched in September of that year and attracted a million users just eight months later. Less than a year later, our user base had swelled to 10 million. By December 2008, Doloff was the proud operator of Russia’s most popular social networks.

Durov reigned as VK CEO until April 21, 2014. Just three weeks after the April Fool’s Day joke was wrong, Doloff submitted his resignation to the board on April 1st, He claimed that it was meant only as a joke– The company removed him as VK’s CEO.

“Interestingly, shareholders didn’t have the courage to do this directly, so we learned about the mysterious dismissals from the media.” Durov wrote to VK The day he was fired.

Durov had a controversial relationship with Russian authorities after rejecting several requests to remove the pages of opposition politicians from the VK, but said his oustermination meant that the company was taken over by Vladimir Putin’s allies. Just five days later, April 26th Doloff left Russia He then said, “There are no plans to return,” as the country is currently not compatible with internet businesses.”

Creating a telegram

In his time as CEO of VK, Durov had Some run-in with the government. So, in 2013, when he was still leading the effort on social networks, he and his brother Nikolai decided to launch a messaging service built on end-to-end encryption to maintain a private message from government interference. The brothers first launched Telegram Messenger on iPhones that August, and later on Android devices.

(A year later, Mark Zuckerberg instructed Facebook to buy WhatsApp on Blockbuster. I said TechCrunchMike Butcher At the time, “When all messaging apps smoke, it doesn’t matter how many messaging apps are there.”)

After Doloff left Russia following his expulsion from VK, New York Times It has been reported Durov “were moving from country to country every few weeks. There was a small band of computer programmers. One day he was in Paris, in Singapore.” Ultimately, Durov established a shop with his team in Berlin, Germany in 2014, and then moved his headquarters to Dubai in 2017. Expand the server Telegram also added that “we cannot infiltrate user privacy and freedom of expression,” and that Telegram “may perform a legal analysis of the request and disclose the individual’s IP address and telephone number to relevant authorities.”

Telegram currently has 1 billion users, making its first profit last year. According to Financial Timesafter announcing a loss of $173 million in 2023 with just $343 million in revenue, the company reported a profit of $540 million in 2024 with $1.4 billion in revenue. Telegram, which issued about $2.4 billion in bonds over the past four years (and bought back $375 million worth of bonds between September and December last year), has also created it on the streets with “conversational AI,” which partners with Elon Musk’s Xai to integrate chatbot, Grok, into a social network.

Legal troubles

August 2024, French authorities detained Doloff After his private jet landed outside Paris, he claimed he had enabled illegal activities such as drug trafficking, fraud and child sexual abuse materials and allowed illegal activities to flow through telegrams. He was forced to stay in the country at the time, but he was finally allowed to leave France in March this year, albeit temporarily. Visit Dubai.

If convicted, Doloff faces up to 10 years in prison. His criminal case once again reinforced the debate on the extent to which technical executives should be responsible for the activities that occur on the platform. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a money laundering violation that occurred on the Crypto Platform in 2024, while Black Market Silk Road creator Ross Ulbrichit Convicted of using the internet to promote criminal businesses. However, Ulbricht was sentenced to double the prison and 40 years in prison, but without the possibility of parole, he was released from prison in January 2025 after serving 12 years in prison. Complete and unconditional pardon President Trump.

This story was originally introduced Fortune.com