Telegram founder Pavel Durov
Credit: AP
“Pick a card,” magician David Blaine said to a group of partygoers inside Barcelona’s Maritime Museum as guests clutching glasses of pink champagne stood beneath thousands of paper planes suspended from the ceiling.
Later that night in 2016, Mark Ronson performed a DJ set as women wearing pilot costumes danced beside him. While the attention was on these attractions, the man who had thrown the party mingled quietly.
Pavel Durov, the Russian entrepreneur behind messaging app Telegram whose wealth has been estimated at $3.4bn (£2.4bn), wore his typical outfit of a black shirt and jacket.
Durov was celebrating his app reaching 100m users. The entrepreneur, who doesn’t drink alcohol or eat fast food, looked on as guests sipped champagne and ate Telegram cupcakes until the party spilled out onto Barcelona’s streets at 2am.
In recent months, Durov’s encrypted messaging app has exploded in popularity. People have signed up in droves for the app that lets them talk securely to friends, send animated stickers and browse public channels for their interests.
They’ve been comforted by the app’s independence, with no social network underpinning Telegram that threatens to use their data to feed them targeted adverts. The messaging app has surpassed 500m monthly active users this year.
Sensor Tower estimates that Telegram has been downloaded 51.7m times so far in January, up 215pc on downloads for January 2020.
The influx has been driven by concerns about Facebook-owned WhatsApp’s policies that could see more user data handed to the app’s owner.
But Durov, who is often referred to as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, faces an uncertain future. He scrapped a $1.2bn plan to raise money through his own cryptocurrency following a legal complaint from the US government. And he’s now attempting to make meaningful amounts of revenue for the first time.
The 36-year-old’s globetrotting lifestyle is in many ways a continuation of his childhood. Born in 1984 in Saint Petersburg, Durov and his family spent years in Turin while his lecturer father taught there.
Pavel and his older brother Nikolai developed a love of technology, but it was his younger brother who started VKontakte, a social network that resembled Facebook.
In 2006, the same year he graduated with a philology degree from Saint Petersburg State University, Durov launched the site, later renamed VK.
The brothers had grand ambitions for their project. A portrait of jailed oil and banking oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky hung in their home, early employee Anton Rozenberg recalled.
Investment ploughed into VK, with its valuation reaching $3bn as the site grew to more than 20m users by 2014.
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A fan of mischievous stunts, Durov and some employees threw around £1,400 worth of money out of their office window in 2012, having folded it into paper planes.
“I remember a software engineer remarking calmly that the sum thrown out of the window exceeded his monthly pay,” Rozenberg wrote.
Durov’s defiant nature clashed with the Russian government’s desire to have the VK pages of protestors removed. Durov refused, responding with a photograph of a dog sticking out its tongue. Armed men visited his apartment that night, he claimed.
Mail.ru, a Russian business with links to the country’s government, began building a stake in VK. Durov resisted attempts to acquire VK, publishing a photograph of himself presenting his middle finger.
The Russian government piled more pressure on Durov, with a 2013 police investigation alleging that he was behind the wheel of a car when it drove into a policeman. Durov denied he owned the car and has said he never learned to drive.
The entrepreneur claims he was pressured into selling his 12pc share to Mail.ru’s owner, giving the business a majority stake in VK that allowed it to oust Durov.
Eventually, Durov’s years of standing up to the Russian government forced him into exile. He boarded a flight out of Russia days before a police raid on VK’s office.
With $300m from the sale of his stake and 2,000 bitcoins, Durov became a nomad. He traveled the world and hired engineers to build Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that threatens to reduce the Russian government’s access to people’s data.
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Durov’s experience in Russia led to a mistrust of governments. “When I lived in Russia, I developed the habit of never speaking over the phone, as every conversation was being recorded by corrupt law enforcement agencies,” Durov wrote on Telegram when he launched encrypted calls.
Durov roamed the world, eventually settling into life in Dubai where he browsed the dating app Tinder. He has since 2017 been linked to Russian glamour model Alena Shishkova, who confirmed their on-off relationship in a recent Instagram post.
He is now a citizen of the Caribbean nation Saint Kitts and Nevis after donating $250,000 to the country’s Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation.
A few posters for our office in Dubai I designed last week. pic.twitter.com/sB6Tw27vS5
— Pavel Durov (@durov) August 11, 2020
The entrepreneur appears around a decade younger than his 36 years of age. He credits a strict lifestyle involving no coffee, alcohol or meat as one of the reasons for his toned physique which he has shown off in photographs shot in the desert.
“I’m a big believer in self-restraint,” he wrote in 2019, “I only had a fever once in the last 15 years. Typically, I just don’t get ill.” He has experimented with fasting, once claiming that a six-day fast helped make him more productive.
Durov is now living the high life, mocking the Russian government while enjoying an influx of privacy-conscious people to Telegram.
But he’s yet to demonstrate that the app can become a sustainable business. It has been estimated that running Telegram consumes around £700,000 of Durov’s fortune every year.
The exile may appear to be in paradise, but he’s facing a ticking clock on whether Telegram can become sustainable as well as popular.
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