Pavel Durov was once hailed as Russia’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg. Now, he is facing prison in France.
The billionaire co-founder of Telegram – an ultra-secure messaging app that boasts over 900 million users – is hailed by some as an anti-authoritarian hero and champion of free speech who took on the might of Vladimir Putin.
For others, he is a negligent tech tycoon responsible for creating a platform where criminal activity goes unchecked.
French authorities, it seems, are in the latter camp. On Saturday, Durov was arrested on arrival at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, after travelling by private jet from Baku, Azerbaijan.
The 39-year-old stands accused of failing to tackle crime on Telegram as part of an inquiry into alleged fraud, drug trafficking and the promotion of terrorism on the platform – dubbed the “new dark web” by critics.
His detention marks the most prominent example of a social media executive being brought to heel yet, raising profound questions for the future of networks used by billions of people, their owners and the regulators and authorities struggling to get to grips with our digital world.
The story of Telegram stretches back to its founding in 2013, when Durov and his brother Nikolai set out to create an app capable of offering total security and anonymity to its users. To this day, the platform collects no user data apart from a phone number – not even a name, email or date or birth – and light touch moderation remains part of its appeal.
It is securely encrypted and sells no data to third parties – Durov, who is worth a reported $15 billion, is so confident in its security that its website offers a $300,000 reward to anyone who proves Telegram messages can be deciphered. In little over a decade, it has risen to become one of the top five most downloaded apps in the world.
Its success is intimately tied to Durov’s own history. His grandparents were among the tens of millions of Russians who were persecuted by Joseph Stalin, with his grandfather sent to one of the autocrat’s infamous gulags. Durov himself was born in 1984 in Leningrad, in then Soviet Russia, to Russian and Ukrainian parents, and spent most of his childhood in Turin, Italy, where his father worked.
By the time the family eventually returned to Russia, the Iron Curtain had come down, and Durov enrolled as a liberal arts student at St Petersburg State University. While there, he began to draw inspiration from Silicon Valley, and the success of Facebook in particular, teaching himself how to code.
Upon graduation, he created VKontakte, a social media network similar to the one dreamed up by Mark Zuckerberg and four of his fellow Harvard students in the US. Indeed, Durov himself has often been described as his country’s answer to the Meta CEO.
VKontakte flourished and quickly became the country’s most popular social platform. Durov has since described it as a “libertarian’s paradise” in the unregulated internet market that existed in Russia at the time.
But in 2011, the tide turned. Putin, then-prime minister, made clear he was seeking to return to the presidency and Durov fell foul of the Kremlin for refusing to adhere to requests to block opposition activity on VKontakte amid mass protests over disputed parliamentary elections. Instead, he made fun of the situation, posting a meme of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue hanging out – as well as scans revealing Moscow’s requests.
Relations continued to sour in the years that followed. Armed police raided his apartment in St Petersburg and, in 2014, he was forced to leave Russia altogether having been fired as VKontakte’s CEO after publically refusing to hand over users’ data to Russian security agencies and block the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s account.
Shortly before fleeing, he was reportedly granted citizenship by St. Kitts and Nevis after investing $250,000 in the Caribbean nation’s sugar industry. “I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” he has since said of his exit from Russia. In 2021, he was controversially granted French citizenship and, prior to his arrest, predominantly resided in Dubai – having obtained a United Arab Emirates passport too.
Durov is said to have an ascetic lifestyle, eschewing meat, alcohol, caffeine and sugar. While he is single and has said he prefers to live alone, he revealed in a Telegram post that he believes he has fathered over 100 children through sperm donation.
On Instagram, where he has 1.5 million followers, Durov regularly posts pictures of exotic destinations and his toned physique. In one recent post, he quotes the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “A man must stand upright, not be kept upright by others.”
It is difficult to tell anything about who Durov actually is from his online footprint, and he rarely gives interviews, but then inscrutability is in Telegram’s DNA.
The app is run via a complicated network of international servers and shell companies to insulate it from regulation and governmental interference. In 2018, he confirmed on X, then Twitter, that Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but is “unlikely to ever consider any location [its] permanent base.”
In March this year, it was reported that Telegram was nearing profitability and was considering an IPO.
Privacy is paramount – it offers users secure messaging and calls, as well as the ability to create “groups” to communicate with up to 200,000 people or “channels” to broadcast to an unlimited number. It also has a self-destructing “Secret Chat” function. In 2015, Durov said that since Telegram was founded, “we haven’t disclosed a single byte of user data to third parties, including government officials.”
The app’s protections have made it a useful news source in parts of the world where censorship is rife and a critical tool for pro-democracy activists living under oppressive regimes such as in Iran and Belarus.
It is especially popular in former Soviet countries, and used extensively by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Russian citizens who want to access uncensored information about the Russia-Ukraine war. It has also been adopted by news publishers including the New York Times and Bloomberg, which both have Telegram accounts.
But it has a dark side, too, with the privacy and anonymity features making the platform a safe haven for criminals. Researchers have warned that Telegram is a sprawling ecosystem of illegal and violent content relating to far-right conspiracy theories, extremism, terrorism and child abuse.
Use of the app surged in the UK after the killing of three schoolgirls in Southport last month, and it was widely linked to the violent unrest that followed on streets across the country, having been used by far-Right agitators to fuel and organise the disorder. The platform acts to remove illegal and harmful content on public channels, but its website says that: “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.”
Before the app took a stronger stance against content linked to terrorism, in particular, in 2019 following the deadly terror attack on London Bridge, it was the favoured platform of Islamic State groups. But experts warn it remains a hotbed for propaganda.
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, it has repeatedly been used by the group to disseminate content. Soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces were also found to be running a graphic, unauthorised Telegram channel. Propaganda, disinformation and violence are rife. Channels on the app reportedly sell weapons, drugs and illegally cloned bank cards.
Telegram then, perhaps more than any other major app, has seemingly become a digital battlefield – one on which authorities, criminals and Durov himself are engaged in a high-stakes showdown. Certainly, his arrest has been met with both outrage and relief.
Russian lawmaker Maria Butina said Durov was a “victim of a witch hunt by the West”, adding his arrest means “freedom of speech in Europe is dead.”
Elon Musk, a fellow tech tycoon and ‘free speech’ advocate, meanwhile used his platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to call on French police to “FreePavel”.
“I don’t think that we should be policing people in the way they express themselves…Otherwise, we can quickly degrade into authoritarianism,” Durov himself told the Financial Times in March.
Clearly, others take a different view. Durov may see his app as the product of a cast-iron commitment to privacy and freedom of expression, but critics argue it has effectively become an online wild west, acting a magnet for bad actors keen on evading tighter restrictions on rival platforms.
“Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one French investigator on Sunday. As Durov awaits an appearance in court, it appears that might just be the case yet.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for comment
