Part IThe Story
The jet landed at Paris–Le Bourget at about eight o'clock on the evening of Saturday, August 24, 2024, at the end of a flight from Baku. Vladimir Putin had been in the Azerbaijani capital that same week, a coincidence that would later sustain a small industry of speculation. The Kremlin said the two men had not met. Pavel Durov came down the steps with a woman and a bodyguard. Officers of the Air Transport Gendarmerie and investigators from France's National Anti-Fraud Office were waiting for him. They had seen his name on the passenger list, and they had a warrant that had been signed in March. By his own account there were about a dozen of them, and they were armed. They read him a list of something like fifteen serious crimes. He had not committed these crimes himself. Some fraction of the roughly 950 million people who used the messaging app he owned had committed them, and the officers held him responsible. His first thought was that someone had made a mistake. According to Le Canard enchaîné, he told the officers he had come to Paris to have dinner with Emmanuel Macron. Macron's office denied it.
He spent the next four days in a small room with no windows and a narrow bed made of concrete. Ninety-six hours is the legal maximum for that kind of custody in France. The French used all of it.
The room deserves attention, because almost everything about the man inside it had been arranged so that he would never end up there. He did not carry a phone, except occasionally to test features of his own product. He held four passports: Russian, Kittitian, Emirati and French. His company was legally domiciled in Tortola and run from Dubai. Its servers were spread across continents, and its decryption keys were divided among legal jurisdictions so that no single government could compel them. People around him said he had been staying out of Europe for exactly this reason. He had gone to the Emirates and to South America instead. Then, on a Saturday night, with a warrant outstanding, he flew into Paris on a private jet. "Perhaps he had a feeling of impunity," a source told the French press. Nikolay Kononov, the Russian journalist who has interviewed him more often than almost anyone, put it less politely: "It looks like he overestimated himself. Durov believed he had unchecked freedom and was too significant to be arrested. France thought differently."
On August 23, 2021, the French state had issued the decree that made Pavel Durov a citizen. He was arrested three years and one day later.
By the Numbers
The Durov Ledger
1B+Telegram monthly active users, announced March 2025
~40Engineers on Telegram's core team
$540MTelegram's 2024 profit, on $1.4B in revenue
100%Durov's ownership stake in Telegram
4Citizenships: Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, UAE, France
€5MBail posted in Paris, August 28, 2024
106Children named as heirs in his 2025 will
Something Written at a Distance
The word is a century and a half older than the app. Gramma is Greek for something written, so a telegram is, literally, something written at a distance. Telegraph customers paid by the word, and their messages shrank to fit. In the United States in the 1900s the average telegram ran 11.93 words, and more than half ran ten words or fewer. The form peaked in 1929 at an estimated 200 million messages and then gave way to the telephone, to telex and finally to the thing the Durov brothers released for the iPhone on August 14, 2013. Nobody knows whether they had the etymology in mind. It fits anyway, because the man who named the app has spent his adult life writing at a distance.
He writes in a channel, as people on Telegram do. His posts are signed Paul Du Rove, the Gallicized name he took when he became French. Some of them reach five or six million views within days. They cover his push-ups, his father, a new batch of collectible gifts and his grievances against governments. Kononov's biography, The Populist, takes its title from this habit, and he means the word literally. "Durov is one of the first digital populists," Kononov has said. "From the very beginning, as soon as he started making his digital products, he programmed into them the ability to write and communicate his ideas directly to his audience." VK and Telegram have both, at times, pushed messages from their founder to every user, including users who never asked for them. In February 2026 Durov sent one to every Telegram user in Spain. It warned that Pedro Sánchez's government was "pushing dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms." Madrid's reply was furious, and fair enough as a description of what had happened: "Spaniards cannot live in a world where foreign tech oligarchs can flood our phones with propaganda at will."
The instinct goes back a long way. At St. Petersburg State University he built a student forum, spbgu.ru, which grew to tens of thousands of users. He later admitted that he had created multiple accounts and argued with himself to get discussions going. After high school, when his friends gathered to talk about what they would do with their lives, he told them without any irony that he would become an "internet prophet." Kononov records a variant: asked what he saw himself doing, Durov smiled and said, "Totem." I want to become an Internet totem. His friends laughed. Kononov, who has followed him for fourteen years and has the odd distinction of being the second Nikolai in Durov's life, says the formula decided everything that came after. "What surprised me most," he said in 2025, "is that Durov hasn't changed or evolved in all the years that I have interviewed him."
The Brother Who Was Wikipedia
Valery Semenovich Durov grew up in postwar Leningrad. He became a Doctor of Philological Sciences and a specialist in Ancient Roman literature, and in 1992 he became head of the department of classical philology at St. Petersburg State University. He spent his career translating Caesar and Seneca. His sons remember mostly the sound of a typewriter in the late 1980s, which was the sound of a man producing books and papers without pause. His own father, Semyon Petrovich Tulyakov, fought on the Leningrad Front with the 65th Infantry. He was wounded three times and decorated with the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Patriotic War. One account of the family history adds a single line: after the war, he was arrested. That pattern of a state decorating a man and then coming for him would turn up again in the family.
The mother was Albina, née Ivanenko. In March 2022, as Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, Pavel wrote that through her he traced his line to Kyiv, and that "to this day we have many relatives living in Ukraine."
In the late 1980s Valery took a post in Turin, and the family moved to Italy. On the first trip Pavel, who was four, was left behind for a while with a grandmother who worked and was too old to play with him. "I learned that I needed to rely on myself," he said years later, and he has rarely spoken more plainly. When he got to Italy, the abundance was what struck him. "You can't experience all the toys, the ice cream of sorts, the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you can access in Italy," he told Lex Fridman. Even a five-year-old could see it, he said. A society without freedom does not have abundance, and the people in it cannot contribute to abundance either.
His brother Nikolai is four years older. He read at an adult level by age three and solved cubic equations at eight, and he appeared on local Italian television as a prodigy. As "Nikolai Dourov" he won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1996, 1997 and 1998, which were the only three years he competed. With St. Petersburg State's team he won the ACM programming world finals in 2000 and 2001. He earned one PhD in St. Petersburg in 2005 with a thesis titled "New Approach to Arakelov Geometry" and a second in Bonn in 2007 under Gerd Faltings, a Fields medalist. He then held a research post at the Steklov Mathematical Institute. Every source describes him as reserved, and he rarely appears in public. Pavel and Nikolai shared a bedroom with their beds a few feet apart, and Pavel questioned him relentlessly about dinosaurs, galaxies, black holes and Neanderthals. "He was my Wikipedia," Pavel says, "back in the time when we didn't have internet access."
When the Soviet Union ended and the family went home, they brought an IBM personal computer from Italy. That made them, as Pavel tells it, one of the few families in Russia that could teach themselves to program. Pavel started at ten, mostly because there were not enough video games and he decided to write his own. One of them is the most revealing story he tells about himself.
In the breaks between classes, his schoolmates played five-in-a-row tic-tac-toe on an unlimited grid. Many of them were children of professors or champions of math olympiads. Pavel wanted to win every game, and to practice he needed an opponent stronger than he was. He wrote a computer opponent that looked four moves ahead, and soon he could beat it. Looking five or six moves ahead made the program too slow, so Nikolai wrote him a better algorithm. Pavel trained against the machine until he could beat it every time, then went back to school and beat everyone else. Before long nobody would play with him. "I killed the game," he says.
At eleven he was admitted to an experimental class at the Academic Gymnasium attached to the university. He had been thrown out of other schools for his behavior, though never for his grades. The experiment was to see what happened when you packed as much as possible into a teenager's brain: Latin, English, French and German, ancient Greek if you wanted it, plus biochemistry, psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology. Getting top marks in every subject was considered impossible, so Pavel set out to do it, mainly because he was bored, and he did it by studying in the breaks between classes. The Guardian, drawing on Kononov, reports that around this time he hacked the school network so that every computer greeted the class with a photograph of a teacher he disliked and the caption Must Die. He was banned from the computer lab for a month. In the Moscow Times version, the school kept changing the passwords and he kept cracking them.
The same year, a biochemistry teacher gave him a book he had written called The Illusion of Paradise. It described what alcohol and drugs do to brain cells. Pavel read it and stopped wanting any of it, at eleven, and as far as anyone knows he has kept to that ever since.
Two Weeks and a Login Screen
Vyacheslav Mirilashvili was born in Leningrad the same year as Durov. His father, Mikhail, is a Georgian Jewish businessman. The son moved to Israel as a child, finished high school there, and graduated from Tufts in 2006 with a degree in economics. That year he was back in St. Petersburg, where he had once been Durov's classmate. He had read about Durov's student forum in the city's main business newspaper, and he asked Durov whether he was building a Russian Facebook. "I'm not sure," Durov answered. "What's Facebook?" Mirilashvili showed him. A third founder, Lev Leviev, an Israeli classmate of Mirilashvili's, joined. Mirilashvili became chairman and majority shareholder, and the Mirilashvili family helped fund the venture.
Durov's reaction to seeing Facebook says more about him than the copying does. He decided he already had most of the technology. What he learned from the American site was what he could leave out. "Sometimes in order to move forward and have more success," he says, "you have to get rid of things."
He decided to build it from scratch, without third-party libraries, and he worried over every line. He had never built anything that large, so he called Nikolai, who was then a postdoc in Germany. Nikolai told him to build only the login: put credentials in the database, type a password, and see the site greet you by name. Once he had that, Nikolai said, he would know where to go next. Pavel calls it some of the best advice he has ever received. He says the first version of VKontakte, which means "in touch," took him two weeks. For almost a year he was the company's only employee. He wrote the back end and the front end, did the design, handled customer support and wrote the marketing copy. His girlfriend compiled a database of every school and university department in Russia, and later in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, by searching online and emailing universities to ask what departments they had.
The beta opened in September 2006, and the company was incorporated on January 19, 2007. It had 1 million users in July 2007 and 10 million in April 2008, and in December 2008 it passed Odnoklassniki as Russia's most popular social network. Odnoklassniki's founder said VK had grown partly by tolerating explicit content and pirated material. He had a point. With Russian copyright enforcement close to nonexistent, VK became the place young Russians went to find friends, find work and listen to new albums illegally. Durov did not dispute it. When regulators complained about pornography on the site, he changed his Twitter handle from "VK CEO" to "Porn King."
The company moved into Singer House, the art nouveau building on Nevsky Prospekt with a glass globe on its corner. The offices included a medieval hall with throne-like chairs and torture instruments on the walls. The staff were mostly young men in their early twenties. Job candidates were asked whether they drank, and the right answer was no. Kononov summed up the atmosphere in a sentence: "The nerds had conquered the world." Around 2008 Nikolai came home from Germany. With another two-time world programming champion he rewrote VK's data engines in C and C++, including search, ads and messaging, until few sites anywhere loaded faster. In 2009 Durov visited Silicon Valley and met Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook was then four or five years old, and people there kept asking how a Russian site managed to load faster than theirs.
In 2012 he published manifestos on how to fix Russia. One line from the one in Afisha captured his whole outlook: "The best legislative initiative — is the absence of one." At the DLD conference that January he pledged $1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. In May he and a colleague folded high-denomination banknotes into paper airplanes and threw them from the VK offices onto the crowds on Nevsky Prospekt.
Mirilashvili sold the last of his VK shares in 2013, at 29, at a valuation above $1 billion, and became one of Israel's richest citizens. He now goes by Yitzchak. He belongs to the Chabad community, gives roughly 150 million shekels a year with his father to Chabad and religious-Zionist causes, and is the controlling shareholder of Channel 14, a conservative broadcaster often compared to Fox News. Durov's co-founder ended up in a particular country, a particular faith, a particular political camp and a very particular television station. Durov went the other way, toward belonging to no place and no side at all.
A Dog in a Hoodie
Russia elected a new Duma in December 2011, and many Russians did not believe the count. Crowds filled the streets of Moscow, organizing largely through groups on VK, including groups around Alexei Navalny with hundreds of thousands of members. The prosecutor's office told Durov to take them down. He posted a scan of the demand next to a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out and called it his official response. Then armed police came to his apartment in St. Petersburg. He did not answer the door, and after about an hour they left.
He told Fridman what he thought about during that hour. First he asked himself whether he had made the right choice and decided he had. Next he worked out what would probably happen: prison. Then he decided what he would do in prison, which was starve himself to death. The last thing he thought about was the one that changed his life. He needed to tell Nikolai what was happening, since they would surely come for his brother too, and he had no way to do it safely. WhatsApp existed but sent messages in plain text. "If I'm going to survive this," he told himself, "I'm definitely launching a secure messaging app." Work on what became Telegram started the following year.
He was summoned, questioned and let go, and from then on he kept a packed backpack. In 2012 Mail.ru Group moved to buy VK, and Durov posted a photo of himself giving the middle finger as his official response. According to Kononov, he was then invited to the Kremlin to meet Putin along with a group of oligarchs. His security guards took his phone at the door. The title of the chapter in which Kononov tells this story quotes the advice Putin gave him: If you want to do this kind of business, do it in Israel. That was the country Mirilashvili had gone to.
In December 2013 Durov sold his remaining 12 percent of VK to Ivan Tavrin, who later sold it on to Mail.ru. At that point Mail.ru owned 40 percent and United Capital Partners owned 48. Kononov saw him in Russia for the last time that January. They walked from Singer House to Terrace, one of the city's most expensive restaurants. Durov wore all black, padded sneakers and a baseball cap, and as usual nobody on Nevsky recognized him. But he kept looking around, and at crossings he watched the slowing cars carefully. Usually he sat outside. This time he took a corner table, and when he sat down he pulled back the curtain behind him to make sure nobody was there.
On April 1, 2014, he submitted his resignation to VK's board and signed it "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish," the line Douglas Adams's dolphins leave Earth with. A company spokesman directed reporters to an "official statement" that turned out to be a Rickroll. On April 3 Durov said the resignation had been an April Fools' joke. On April 16 he publicly refused the FSB's demand for the personal data of VK users organizing around Euromaidan in Kyiv, and its demand that he block Navalny's page. He posted the orders on his own VK page and called them unlawful. On April 21 the board dismissed him, saying it was simply acting on a resignation he had never withdrawn. The Moscow Times reported that he found out from the media. He said the company had in effect been taken over by Putin's allies. He left Russia, said he had "no plans to go back," and said the country was "incompatible with internet business at the moment." That September Mail.ru bought the rest of VK for $1.5 billion.
— Pavel Durov, quoted by Forbes, March 2022I lost my company and my home, but would do it again – without hesitation.
The story of the exile has a complication that his followers prefer to leave out. The Russian investigative outlet iStories found that Durov went back to Russia more than fifty times between 2015 and 2021. Irina Bolgar, who met him in 2012, told The New York Times that after a few months abroad he came back with her and they resumed their life together in an apartment in central St. Petersburg. A former employee described them to the paper as a loving couple. A spokesman for Durov said he had lived mainly outside Russia since 2013 and had never hidden his trips back.
A Passport Bought With Sugar
The first new citizenship came from Saint Kitts and Nevis, a two-island federation in the Leeward Islands. It cost $250,000, paid to the Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation. Durov also had $300 million in cash sitting in Swiss banks. With those two things he and a core team of about fifteen people moved from country to country. Berlin was home in 2014 until Germany would not give residence permits to the whole team, and they left early in 2015. Telegram's FAQ still says the company will not disclose where it rents offices or which entities sign the leases, in order to "shelter the team from unnecessary influence." Its data centers are held through layers of shell companies in different jurisdictions, set up, critics say, to make subpoenas useless. Durov describes the principle directly. "Humans are attack vectors," he told Fridman. An employee who can read a message is someone a government can pressure. So nobody can read them, and if you pulled every drive out of every rack, he says, "you won't get anything."
In 2017 the team settled in Dubai. That year, according to The Wall Street Journal, French intelligence and the UAE jointly hacked Durov's iPhone in an operation called Purple Music, concerned about who was using his app: dissidents and democracy activists, along with jihadists, drug dealers and cybercriminals. A year later Macron invited Durov to lunch and suggested Telegram move its headquarters to Paris. Durov declined. In February 2021 the Emirates, one of the two governments that had reportedly hacked his phone, made him a citizen, and the UAE invested more than $75 million in Telegram. In August 2021 France, the other one, naturalized him as well. Le Monde called it "mysterious." He had never lived in France beyond short visits, and the paper suspected the rarely used "merit foreigner" route, which the government grants to people judged to have contributed exceptionally to France's international standing. He took the name Paul du Rove. A year later he told his followers he had applied as an April Fools' joke, forgotten about it, and only later found out that "the application actually got approved and the passport reissued."
He has said Dubai is "the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in if we want to make sure we can defend our users' privacy and freedom of speech." For his household it worked out differently. According to Forbes, the UAE did not legally recognize children born outside marriage at the time. So when Durov moved to Dubai in 2017, Bolgar and their three children, born in St. Petersburg between 2013 and 2017, stayed behind in Russia.
Nineteen Million Addresses
On April 13, 2018, a Moscow court banned Telegram after a hearing The New York Times said lasted eighteen minutes. The company had refused to give the FSB encryption keys, which Durov says do not exist in any usable form. Roskomnadzor, the state censor, started blocking IP addresses. Telegram had built a system that automatically swapped in new addresses as soon as old ones were blocked, and Durov launched what he called the Digital Resistance, asking system administrators around the world to run proxies. He says the effort cost Telegram millions of dollars. The censor responded by blocking huge subnets, 19 million addresses at the peak, many of them belonging to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Shops lost their card terminals. Mastercard SecureCode went down. So did Mail.ru's own messaging service. During the whole two-year ban, Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept posting to its official Telegram channels.
That spring, protesters in Moscow threw paper airplanes into the air in support of the app.
The biggest danger, Durov says, came from Apple, which held up Telegram's updates worldwide for weeks and told him to settle with Russia first. A new version of iOS broke the outdated app for users who had nothing to do with Russia. On a Friday he told his team that if nothing changed by 6 p.m. they would pull Telegram from the Russian App Store and keep it running everywhere else. Fifteen minutes before the deadline, Apple approved the update. Russia lifted the ban in June 2020, saying Telegram had agreed to help with extremism investigations.
Iran had been dealing with the same problem. On December 30, 2017, during nationwide protests, Telegram shut down an opposition channel that had posted calls to throw Molotov cocktails at police. Durov said criticizing the authorities was fine and promoting violence was not. The opposition opened a new channel that followed the rules, and it reached 700,000 subscribers in less than twenty-four hours. Iran blocked Telegram briefly that winter, and President Rouhani said the ban had cost more than 100,000 jobs. An Iranian MP pointed out that during those two weeks, 30 million users, three-quarters of Telegram's Iranian audience, had moved to VPNs rather than to the government's preferred local apps. Iran blocked Telegram for good on May 1, 2018. This time Telegram did not pay for proxies. It let anyone who ran a proxy show a pinned sponsored chat to the people who connected through it, which turned getting around the ban into a small business for Iranians. Durov says something like 50 million people in Iran still use the app.
When Hong Kong protesters used Telegram to coordinate in June 2019, a large denial-of-service attack hit the service, mostly from mainland China. In August 2020, during Belarus's internet blackout, 45 percent of the people in Telegram protest chats were online anyway. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Durov proposed suspending political channels in both countries for the duration of the war, and users in both countries objected. He says they told him he did not get to babysit them.
The record has gaps if you look closely. In 2015 Iran's ICT ministry said Telegram had agreed to restrict some bots and sticker packs used to mock the government. In September 2021, the night before Russian regional elections, Telegram blocked Navalny's Smart Voting bot. Durov blamed Apple and Google and posted the App Store email to prove it, which did not satisfy Navalny's spokeswoman. In February 2022 Germany announced that 64 channels had been deleted at its request. In March 2022 Brazil's supreme court suspended Telegram for ignoring court orders, and Durov explained that the court had been emailing an "old general-purpose email address" nobody checked. Telegram's FAQ says that "to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments." Durov himself has said Telegram responded to 6,992 legal requests from India in the first nine months of 2024. Those two statements can both be true, because one is about message contents and the other is about user data, but the distinction is easy to overlook.
Telegram's core engineering team is about forty people, covering back end, front end, design and system administration. They manage close to 100,000 servers across several continents. That is only possible because Durov will not let them hire people to do the work by hand, so they have to automate it. Most engineers are hired through public coding contests. A typical recruit might have entered ten contests since age fourteen and won eight. Durov tends to value them more because they have never worked at a big company. "Why would I even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who worked at Google," he asks, someone "used to receiving salary for nothing"? When an engineer tells him a feature will take three weeks, he usually replies that he built the first VK in two.
The results are visible in small details. Secret Chats with self-destruct timers shipped in 2013, and other apps took years to follow. Durov says that when they did, the first copies used the same intervals, one, three and five seconds, because nobody knew which part of the design mattered and nobody wanted to change anything that might. Telegram's stickers are vector animations, usually a few dozen kilobytes, 180 frames each, played at sixty frames per second on cheap phones. WhatsApp shipped its stickers three years and eight months later. The chat background is a moving gradient of four colors with a pattern on top, and Durov says he reviewed several thousand versions before choosing the default. When you delete a message, it breaks into thousands of particles while the messages around it close the gap, the "Thanos snap." He says it was very hard to build on Android. He justifies all this with arithmetic: a half-second delay, multiplied by dozens of launches a day and a billion users, adds up to centuries of human time lost "without any reason other than just being sloppy."
Kononov sees the other side of it. "He is essentially the only one making all the product decisions at Telegram," he said. "Marketing, PR — it's a one-man show." The libertarian runs his company like an autocrat, and he hardly denies it. "There are no shareholders," Durov says, "which is quite unique."
The cryptography is partly the same kind of story. Nikolai designed MTProto, Telegram's encryption protocol. In 2013 Telegram offered $200,000 in bitcoin to anyone who could break it. Moxie Marlinspike, who founded Signal, said the contest was set up so that it could not be won even if the underlying algorithms were badly broken. In December 2020 researchers at the University of Udine produced an automated formal proof that MTProto 2.0's protocols were sound. They also noted that since all traffic goes through Telegram's servers, and the server chooses the Diffie–Hellman parameters, "the server should not be considered as trusted." End-to-end encryption on Telegram is opt-in, available only in one-to-one chats, and most users never turn it on.
The money involved went from enormous to strained and back again. Durov paid for Telegram himself for years. In January and February 2018 he raised about $1.7 billion from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Benchmark for the Telegram Open Network, a blockchain designed by Nikolai with its own token, the Gram. On October 30, 2019, the day before the scheduled launch, the SEC got a temporary restraining order. Judge P. Kevin Castel agreed with the SEC that the sale had been an unregistered securities offering. On June 26, 2020, Telegram settled by paying an $18.5 million penalty and agreeing to return $1.22 billion. In March 2021 it sold $1 billion in five-year bonds to cover $625.7 million in debts, including $433 million owed to Gram buyers. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners bought another $150 million. The next day Mubadala said Russia's sovereign wealth fund had participated through a joint platform. Telegram said that fund was not among its investors and that it "wouldn't be open to any transaction" with it. Before the bonds, Durov reportedly turned down offers that valued the company at $30 to $40 billion. He issued $330 million more in bonds in 2024, and in 2025 he raised $1.7 billion in convertible bonds that attracted BlackRock and Citadel. In March 2026 he announced that the 2021 bonds had been fully repaid.
Telegram earned its first annual profit in 2024: $540 million on $1.4 billion in revenue. Most of it came from things Durov says he can live with. More than 15 million people pay for Premium. Ads appear in public channels and are targeted by channel topic rather than by anything known about the person reading. There are also collectible gifts on the TON blockchain. A batch of Snoop Dogg gifts sold $12 million in thirty minutes. For Telegram's twelfth birthday, a set including "Durov's Sunglasses," priced at about $600 and limited to three per Premium user, sold out in fifteen seconds. Durov estimates that by refusing to target ads with personal data he leaves about 80 percent of the possible revenue unclaimed. His salary is one dirham, roughly a third of a dollar. He says Telegram has cost him more personally than it has paid him, and that his private jets and rented villas are paid for by bitcoin he started buying in 2013 at around $700. Friends felt sorry for him when it fell toward $200 the next year. He didn't sell.
The Moderator Who Wasn't There
In September 2015 someone asked Durov about the Islamic State using his app. His answer is the one his critics still quote most often.
— Pavel Durov, September 2015I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism.
He also suggested, sarcastically, that governments might as well ban words, since terrorists use those too. Telegram's rules forbid only three things: calls to violence, illegal pornography and scams. Durov has defended leaving conspiracy theories alone with a line from his own experience: "In my 20 years of managing discussion platforms, I noticed that conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators." Telegram did move against ISIS. From December 2016 it posted daily takedown counts in a channel called @ISISwatch. In 2018 it partnered with Europol, and U.S. officials later called its purge of the group especially effective. Saudi Arabia's Etidal center says it has removed 59 million pieces of extremist content in cooperation with Telegram since 2022.
The complaints kept piling up anyway. Far-right groups used Telegram to coordinate the riots that followed the Southport stabbings in the summer of 2024, and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate called the app "a cesspit of antisemitic content." In July 2023 police in Hyderabad traced ₹712 crore, about $74 million, taken from 15,000 Indians through "prepaid task" scams on Telegram, with the money laundered to China. In Brazil, after a series of school attacks, Telegram handed over only part of the data requested on two antisemitic groups and was fined a million reais a day. An August 2024 BBC investigation found Telegram had not responded to invitations to join the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children or the Internet Watch Foundation, the two main clearinghouses for identifying child abuse material. The same month, a Korean journalist exposed Telegram chats where teenagers were making deepfake pornography of their classmates.
French prosecutors had opened their investigation in February 2024, after OFMIN, the national office for minors, reported what the prosecutors called "the almost total absence of response from Telegram to the judicial requisitions." Belgian partners in Eurojust said they had seen the same thing. Warrants for Pavel and Nikolai followed in March. On August 28 Pavel was charged and released on €5 million bail, ordered to report to a police station twice a week and barred from leaving France. The charges included complicity in running a platform used for illicit transactions, complicity in distributing child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering, refusal to cooperate with lawful requests, and providing cryptology services without declaring them. On the same day, the Juvenile Office opened a separate investigation into an alleged act of violence against one of his children in Paris in November 2021.
The reaction split along familiar lines. Edward Snowden said Macron had "descended to the level of taking hostages." Elon Musk joked about being executed in 2030 Europe for liking a meme. Paul Graham said it was "hard to imagine a country both arresting the founder of Telegram and being a major startup hub." The Ukrainian producer Alexander Rodnyansky called the arrest "a gift to Vladimir Putin." Dmitry Medvedev said Durov had "miscalculated" in thinking foreign police would be easier on him than Russian ones. Macron said the arrest was "no political motive" and added that "in a state governed by the rule of law, on social networks as in real life, freedoms are exercised within a framework established by law." Durov later told Fridman his own version of the months that followed, which France has not confirmed. He said French intelligence approached him through intermediaries about removing channels in Moldova during its election, and that after Telegram removed a few that actually broke its rules, someone spoke favorably about him to his investigating judge. He also said the head of French foreign intelligence personally asked him to suppress conservative voices before Romania's rerun presidential election. He refused, and since he does not sign NDAs, he published the conversation.
Within days, Telegram began changing quietly. On September 5 Durov posted on his channel:
— Pavel Durov, on his Telegram channel, September 2024Telegram's abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard.
The People Nearby feature was removed. Later in September Telegram said it would give users' IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities with valid legal requests. In June 2025 he told Tucker Carlson, "To be honest, I'm still looking for answers. I'm puzzled." He was allowed to leave France for Dubai on March 15, 2025. From July he could leave for up to two weeks at a time with a week's notice to the judge. The travel ban was lifted completely in November 2025. The case is still open.
Three Hundred Push-Ups, One Hundred Children
Each morning, before he looks at anything with a screen, he does three hundred push-ups and three hundred squats. He admits they do little for his body. He does them because he doesn't want to. "Squats are particularly boring," he says. "They're not that hard, they're just boring." He calls the muscle he is working "the muscle of self-discipline." He goes to the gym five or six days a week, takes ice baths, and sits in a Russian banya hotter than Fridman could stand. He has swum across Lake Geneva and Lake Zurich. In Finland he once swam for five and a half hours in cold water and got lost. He eats within a six-hour window, mostly seafood and vegetables, and gave up red meat around twenty years ago. In June 2019 he drank only water for at least six days to see whether it made him more creative. He takes no pills. He says he hasn't been depressed in twenty years. He sets aside eleven or twelve hours for sleep and spends the time he doesn't sleep lying in bed thinking, which he calls his favorite part of the day. "The more connected and accessible you are," he says, "the less productive you are."
He takes the mouse-paradise experiment seriously. In Universe 25, an ethologist gave a colony of mice unlimited food, water and nesting space with no predators. The population grew, then the mice stopped raising their young, and eventually the colony died out completely, the last mouse surrounded by food it never ate. "We have evolved to overcome scarcity," Durov said. He also noted that he grew up poor, wore the same secondhand jacket for years, and watched his father go months without being paid while his mother worked two jobs. "It was not easy, but it also created purpose."
In July 2024 Durov posted that he had more than 100 biological children. Fifteen years earlier, he said, a friend whose wife could not conceive had asked him to be a sperm donor because they wanted someone they knew and respected rather than an anonymous stranger. Over time this led to more than a hundred couples in twelve countries, and at least one IVF clinic still keeps his frozen sperm for anonymous use. The next day, Irina Bolgar contacted Forbes. She provided documents showing she is the mother of three of his children, along with a family photo from 2020. Forbes confirmed the documents were authentic. She also had receipts and a notarized document promising up to €150,000 a month in support. She said the relationship lasted until the end of 2022. She said he stopped paying support at the start of 2023 and that she had been raising the children on her salary of 8,000 Swiss francs a month. In March 2023 she filed a criminal complaint in Geneva alleging that Durov had been violent toward their youngest son, born in September 2017, five times in 2021 and 2022. She said the injuries included a concussion. Prosecutors at first refused the complaint because it was filed late, and an appeals court allowed it to proceed in October 2023. A Geneva court gave her sole custody in May 2023 and suspended his parental rights, and reaffirmed the ruling in February 2024. According to Forbes, Durov did not contest it and appears not to have hired a lawyer or replied to the court. The Paris investigation concerns the same child. In September 2024 Bolgar said publicly that Telegram, conceived during their ten years together, should count as jointly acquired property. Russian Forbes reports he has two more children with Daria Bondarenko, a university classmate who lives in Barcelona. Most accounts say he has six children with three partners. He has never married. He has often spoken about the advantages of living alone.
In June 2025 he told Le Point he had written a will. "I make no difference between my children," he said. Children conceived naturally and children from his donations "are all my children and will all have the same rights! I don't want them to tear each other apart after my death." There are 106 of them, and none can inherit for thirty years. The youngest will turn thirty, by his calculation, by June 19, 2055. "I want them to live like normal people," he said, "to build themselves up alone, to learn to trust themselves."
Shortly after Telegram's twelfth birthday, he asked his father, who had just turned eighty, what advice he should pass on to the next generation. Valery gave him three pieces and Pavel posted them. The first: "Lead by example. People — especially kids — follow what you do, not what you say."
Every Capital, Eventually
The jurisdictions he moved to and the states he relied on began to work against him. In September 2024 Ukraine banned Telegram on official devices, citing intelligence that Russia could get at messages and user data. Moldova's president, Maia Sandu, said Telegram had offered "zero collaboration" on vote-buying before her country's 2025 election, and analysts there counted a third of local channels spreading Kremlin propaganda. In February 2026 the Philippines threatened a ban and then dropped it after Telegram agreed to a 24/7 reporting line. On February 10, 2026, Roskomnadzor began throttling Telegram across Russia while the state promoted its own messenger, Max. In June 2026 India, Telegram's biggest market, blocked the app before a rerun of the national medical entrance exam because of leaked papers. Durov said India had "punished" more than 150 million people. On August 3, 2026, Apple removed Telegram from the App Store for several hours after finding abuse material in a public group. Durov said an extortionist had planted it by editing an old message, and complained that Apple pulled the app before contacting Telegram. Ukrainians call him Moscow's man. Moscow calls him Kyiv's.
At the end of July 2026 the FSB charged him with aiding terrorism and put him on an international wanted list. The charge carries a possible life sentence. The agency said Ukrainian intelligence had used Telegram channels and a dating bot to recruit Russians as young as twelve for sabotage. Telegram's account on X answered with an image of Durov raising his middle finger, the same gesture he aimed at Mail.ru in 2012.
The day after the arrest at Le Bourget, back in August 2024, Russians who supported Durov went to the French embassy in Moscow. Russian law punishes unauthorized group protests with up to fifteen days in jail, so they came one at a time. They placed paper airplanes around the building. One man held a sign telling France not to "follow in Putin's footsteps." Russian police detained him. The paper airplanes remained on the ground around the embassy.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from the record in Part I. That record includes Durov's successes and also the bills that came due. Some lessons are for founders who want to copy him, and at least one is for founders who would rather not end up in that concrete room.
The principles
- 1.Build the distance into the architecture.
- 2.Treat headcount as attack surface.
- 3.Recruit through contests, not résumés.
- 4.Keep the veto: borrow before you sell.
- 5.Start from the login screen.
- 6.Treat latency as a moral quantity.
- 7.Monetize the surface, never the interior.
- 8.Publish the demand.
- 9.Make censorship expensive for the censor.
- 10.Subtract inputs before you add effort.
- 11.Own a direct channel and know its limits.
- 12.Treat under-moderation as compounding debt.
Principle 1
Build the distance into the architecture
Most companies treat privacy as a policy, which is a promise that holds until a court or a regulator tests it. Durov treated it as a structural problem. Telegram's decryption keys are divided among legal jurisdictions. Its data centers are held through separate entities. Its offices and the companies leasing them are not disclosed. No single government can force the whole system to open, because no single government can reach all of it. The point of the design is that Telegram does not need to win any one confrontation. It only needs to make sure no single authority can compel everything.
He applied the same thinking to himself, with four passports and a home in a jurisdiction he considered neutral, and that version failed. Le Bourget showed that a person is easier to seize than a server network, and that holding a country's passport puts you under its jurisdiction. Durov is a single point of failure, which is exactly what he designed the servers to avoid.
The real lesson is to figure out where your weakest point is. For many founders it is themselves.
Tactic: Map every way a single authority could compel your system to act, and redesign until no single subpoena, employee or executive can open it alone.
Principle 2
Treat headcount as attack surface
"Humans are attack vectors," Durov says, and he means it in two ways. In security terms, every employee with access to data is a person who can be bribed, threatened or legally compelled. In organizational terms, every extra hire adds coordination work, and an underused employee, he argues, "will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere," often by creating problems. Telegram runs close to 100,000 servers with about forty core engineers because the constraint is intentional. If engineers cannot hire someone to handle a task manually, they have to automate it, and automated systems tend to be more reliable and cheaper.
The non-obvious part is the order of operations. Most companies hire and then automate when costs force them to. Durov reverses it and treats the hiring limit as the thing that drives the design. He also describes cases where firing an engineer increased output, because the remaining team no longer had to work around someone falling behind.
Tactic: Before approving a new role, ask what the team would build if the hire were forbidden, and fund that instead.
Principle 3
Recruit through contests, not résumés
Telegram hires mainly through public coding contests for real product problems, such as redesigning a profile animation in the open-source Android client. The company gets two things from each contest: the best candidate and the best solution. Repeated contests give it a long record on each person. Durov describes candidates who have competed in ten contests since age fourteen and won eight. This approach tracked his own history. He was raised by a brother who won olympiads, schooled in a class run on competition, and inclined to judge people by results rather than credentials.
He also likes that contest winners often have no big-company experience. He wants people who have never learned to spread responsibility around, sit in long meetings or collect a salary for little work. And since contestants have to know the product to compete, every hire is already a user.
Tactic: Replace your next job posting with a paid public challenge built around a real problem on your roadmap, and keep repeating it until the same names keep winning.
Principle 4
Keep the veto: borrow before you sell
Durov says "There are no shareholders," and that sentence explains a lot. When the TON token sale collapsed and Telegram owed investors hundreds of millions of dollars, he did not sell equity. He issued bonds: $1 billion in 2021, $150 million more from Abu Dhabi, $330 million in 2024 and $1.7 billion in convertibles in 2025. He reportedly turned down equity offers valuing Telegram at $30 to $40 billion. Debt has to be repaid, but lenders don't sit on the board, and Telegram repaid the 2021 bonds in March 2026.
Owning all of the company is what makes the rest of his approach possible. He can tell Fridman that losing an entire national market "won't affect my lifestyle in any way" and mean it, because no board will remove him for it. The lesson from VK is that his principles cost him the company there because other people owned it.
D
Two Ways to Fund a Platform
How Durov's capital choices diverge from the venture default.
| Conventional path | Durov's path |
|---|---|
| Raise equity rounds; give up board seats. | Self-fund, then borrow through bonds; keep 100%. |
| Accept the highest valuation offered. | Reportedly decline a $30–40B valuation. |
| Monetize through targeted advertising. | Context-based channel ads, Premium, collectibles. |
| Founder salary set by the board. | One dirham a year; personal costs paid from bitcoin. |
Tactic: Before each financing, list the decisions you would no longer be able to make alone afterward, and price that loss of control into the terms.
Principle 5
Start from the login screen
When Pavel asked how to start building something as large as a social network, Nikolai told him to build only the login, with credentials entered by hand, so he could type a password and see the site greet him. That small piece made the rest of the project clear. Durov had something working in two weeks and kept building from it.
The advice is about momentum. "You gain energy by doing something," Durov told Fridman. He applies the same idea to depression, to going to the gym, and to writing a novel by writing one paragraph. The connection to company-building is that the first usable piece matters more than the full plan, because it shows you what to build next. The two-week VK also became his standard when engineers ask for three weeks.
Tactic: For any large project, identify the smallest piece that produces a visible, working response, and ship that first.
Principle 6
Treat latency as a moral quantity
In 2009 Silicon Valley engineers asked Durov how VK loaded faster than Facebook. The answer was Nikolai's engines rewritten in C and C++. Twenty years later Durov still explains speed with arithmetic: a half-second delay, multiplied by dozens of launches a day across a billion users, adds up to "centuries, millennia lost for humanity." Faster code also needs less hardware, so speed improves both the product and the costs.
The same care goes into design. The four-color moving gradient went through several thousand variations. The deletion animation had to dissolve the message while the surrounding messages closed the gap, on every device and operating system. Users rarely notice these details consciously, and Durov has made that his reason for caring about them. "People like when other people care," he says.
Tactic: Assign a cost in user-hours to every 100 milliseconds of delay in your core flow and review that number alongside revenue.
Principle 7
Monetize the surface, never the interior
Telegram makes money from public things: ads in public channels targeted by topic, Premium features for heavy users, Stars for digital goods, and collectible gifts that show up on profiles. It does not make money from private messages, contacts or behavior. Durov estimates this leaves about 80 percent of potential ad revenue unclaimed. Telegram still reached a $540 million profit in 2024.
The less obvious point is that the limit pushed Telegram to invent new products. Without access to personal data, it had to make users want to pay. A Snoop Dogg gift collection sold $12 million in thirty minutes, and a fifteen-second sellout of sunglasses priced at about $600 says something about how attached people are to the platform. "When you are trying to monetize social media platform in a way that is consistent with your values," Durov says, "you are forced to find ways that benefit your users, not exploit them."
Tactic: Draw a clear line between data you will never monetize and surfaces you will, and invest product effort in making the second category valuable.
Principle 8
Publish the demand
Durov has a consistent way of handling pressure from authorities: he makes it public. In 2011 he posted the prosecutor's demand next to a dog in a hoodie. In 2014 he posted the FSB's orders on Ukrainian protesters and Navalny. In 2018 he publicly accused Apple of siding with the censor, and The New York Times picked up the story. In 2025 he published his account of French intelligence asking about Romania. He does not sign NDAs with officials, so he is free to talk.
Publicity works because a demand is cheaper to make when nobody sees it. Making it public brings in users, journalists and competing governments as witnesses. It has a cost. The 2014 publication was followed by his dismissal within a week. And it only works if your own record holds up, which is why the Navalny bot in 2021 and the Brazilian email inbox still come up.
Tactic: Establish in advance which government requests you will disclose publicly, and refuse confidentiality terms that would prevent it.
Principle 9
Make censorship expensive for the censor
Durov rarely tries to defeat a block head-on. He raises its cost. In Russia, Telegram rotated IP addresses until the censor blocked 19 million of them and broke Mastercard SecureCode and its own country's services in the process. In Iran, Telegram let proxy operators earn money from pinned sponsored chats, so Iranians themselves maintained the workaround. In both countries the block eventually cost more than it achieved. Russia lifted its ban, and Iran's has turned into a VPN routine for tens of millions of people.
⚖
The Jurisdictional Ledger
Selected state confrontations and how they resolved.
| State | Episode | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Russia | 2018–2020 ban; 19M IPs blocked | Prevailed |
| Iran | 2018 block; proxy economy | Partial |
| Russia | 2021 Navalny Smart Voting bot | Conceded |
| Brazil | 2023 neo-Nazi probe; R$1M daily fine | Conceded |
| France | 2024 arrest; IP and phone disclosure policy | Conceded |
| Russia | 2026 throttling; terrorism warrant | Ongoing |
The table shows the limit. Rising costs work against authoritarian regimes that block a product from outside. They work much less well against democracies that use courts, against app stores that control distribution, or against a government that has the founder in custody.
Tactic: For every blocking scenario, design a workaround that your users or third parties can run and profit from without you.
Principle 10
Subtract inputs before you add effort
Durov's daily routine is mostly a list of things he removed: alcohol at eleven, red meat about twenty years ago, sugar, pills, the phone, the news feed and porn. He does not frame this as virtue. He frames it as protecting the brain from damage and his attention from other people's agendas. He asks of every news story, "Who benefits from me reading this?" and concludes that most of it is written to sell him something or recruit him to a cause.
Telegram reflects the same choice, since it has no algorithmic feed. The idea that scarcity drives creativity runs through his life: Soviet children wrote their own games because they had few, and the Universe 25 mice died with food all around them. For him, having fewer inputs is what makes strategy possible, because a mind full of inputs only reacts.
Tactic: Protect the first hours of each day from every screen-based input, and use them to decide what you, not your feeds, consider important.
Principle 11
Own a direct channel and know its limits
Durov built a way to speak to his audience directly into both of his companies. His channel reaches millions with no editor in between, and he has pushed messages to every user in a country. In crises such as the 2018 Apple standoff or his arrest, that direct line let him tell his version first and organize support.
The Spanish episode shows where it stops working. A founder who controls a billion-user platform and uses it to lobby against a government's legislation looks to that government like what Madrid called him, a "foreign tech oligarch," and the message becomes evidence for regulating the platform. Kononov's description, the "digital populist," was not a compliment.
Tactic: Use your direct channel to explain and to disclose, but avoid using the platform itself as a political megaphone in markets you depend on.
Principle 12
Treat under-moderation as compounding debt
This is the expensive lesson. For a decade Telegram's sparse moderation was presented as principle, and some of it was: privacy, neutrality, the argument that deleting conspiracy theories strengthens them. But every ignored legal request, every unread inbox and every refused invitation from a child-safety group added to a debt that eventually came due all at once, on a runway in Paris. Within a month of the arrest, Durov was citing "growing pains," removing People Nearby and handing over IP addresses and phone numbers.
T
The Moderation Curve
How Telegram's stance shifted under accumulating pressure.
2015
Durov: privacy matters more than "fear of bad things happening, like terrorism."
2016
@ISISwatch begins publishing daily takedown counts.
2018
Partnership with Europol against Islamic State content.
2024
Arrest in Paris; People Nearby removed; IP and phone disclosures begin.
2025
Telegram blocks Huione Guarantee and Xinbi, marketplaces linked to scam networks.
The point is not that Durov was simply wrong. Telegram's channels did serve protesters in Iran, Belarus and Hong Kong. The point is that refusing to moderate is itself a decision, and the costs land on whoever owns it. Because Durov owns all of Telegram, they landed on him.
Tactic: Build working legal-request and child-safety channels before you need them, because the cost of building them under prosecution is far higher.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Pavel Durov, Lex Fridman Podcast #482The biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of.
— Pavel Durov, Lex Fridman Podcast #482The conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are.
— Pavel Durov, on his Telegram channelIn my 20 years of managing discussion platforms, I noticed that conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators.
— Pavel Durov, relaying his father Valery Durov's advice on his 80th birthdayMoral compass, unlike intelligence or creativity, is the ultimate human quality that will not lose value even in the age of AI.
— Pavel Durov, to Le Point, June 2025I want them to live like normal people, to build themselves up alone, to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account.
Maxims
- Architect against the subpoena. If one authority can compel the whole system, privacy is only a promise until someone tests it.
- Constrain headcount to force automation. Every hire adds coordination cost and one more person who can be pressured.
- Hire the winners of real problems. Contests show what résumés claim and solve your roadmap while they do it.
- Borrow before you sell. Lenders have to be repaid, but they don't get a vote.
- Ship the login first. One working piece shows you more than any plan.
- Count latency in human lifetimes. At a billion users, half a second is a moral question.
- Sell the surface, not the interior. Leaving revenue on the table forces you to build things users will pay for.
- Make every demand public. Requests made in private are cheap, and publishing them raises the price.
- Make the censor pay. Design workarounds that cost the blocker more than the block is worth.
- Moderation debt compounds. Leaving it unpaid eventually costs the person who owns the company, not just the company.
