Telegram founder Durov, the mysterious, globe-trotting tech billionaire who, like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was considered a child prodigy with the eccentric lifestyle of Jack Dorsey and the libertarianism of Elon Musk and a similar obsession with pronatalism was arrested in France on Saturday and parenting children, writes CNN.
In July, Mr. Durov said that over the past 15 years, thanks to donated sperm, he had fathered more than 100 children.
According to Forbes magazine, his wealth is valued at 15.5 billion. US dollars. Armed with passports from different countries and multiple residences, he has been living a life without borders for a decade, often traveling the world shirtless to ensure freedom of communication from the prying eyes of democratically elected or authoritarian governments.
Now Mr. Durov’s legal problems have stirred up a long-running debate in which Telegram’s full-conversation encryption, which ensures that communications between users are secure even from the company’s employees, faces security concerns from various governments and a European Union campaign to rein in big tech.
Prodigy brothers
Mr. Durov was born in 1984. in the Soviet Union but moved to Italy at the age of four, the tech entrepreneur told right-wing US media personality Tucker Carlson in a rare interview earlier this year. The family returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Mr. Durov’s father received an offer to work at St. Petersburg State University.
Mr. Durov said that he and his older brother Nikolai were math prodigies from an early age. When they were children, the bigger star of the family was his older brother Nikolai. Mr. Durov said that his brother, as a child, took part in an Italian TV show where he solved cubic equations in real time, and repeatedly won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. However, the young man was not far behind – his younger brother Durov was the best student in his school and participated in local competitions.
“We were both very passionate programmers and designers,” said Mr. Durov.
He said the family brought back an IBM PC XT computer from Italy when they returned to Russia, meaning they were “one of the few families in Russia in the early 1980s who could actually teach themselves how to program.”
“Russia’s M. Zuckerberg”
Mr. Durov’s programming skills and entrepreneurial spirit led him to create the social media site Vkontakte (later renamed VK) in 2006, when he was a 21-year-old fresh out of university. VK quickly became known as Russia’s Facebook, and Mr. Durov as the country’s answer to the social network’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
However, Mr. Durov’s relationship with the Kremlin turned hostile much faster than Mr. Zuckerberg’s relationship with Washington.
When in 2013 Russian opposition groups and protesters began using VK to organize demonstrations in Kiev against pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Durov said, after the Kremlin asked the site to hand over private data of Ukrainian users.
“We decided to give up, and the Russian government didn’t like it very much,” Durov told Carlson.
This decision determined Mr. Durov’s fate in the company. Durov later resigned as CEO, opening the door for people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin to take over.
The businessman sold all his shares for millions and left Russia. Today, VK is effectively controlled by the state.
“Getting rich was never important to me. Everything in my life has been about becoming free. As far as possible, my life’s mission is to allow other people to become free, P. Durov said. “I don’t want to give orders to anyone.”
Safety above all else
Mr. Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp to build a social media empire, now known as Meta, while Mr. Durov chose to build his own messaging app, even though the market for such platforms was already crowded.
He didn’t think everything out there was good enough.
“It doesn’t matter how many messaging apps there are if they’re all bad,” – 2015 Durov told TechCrunch.
Mr. Durov said his experience with the Kremlin was the main motivation behind establishing Telegram, which is now based in Dubai. He and his brother wanted to create something that would be free from the prying eyes of the authorities.
The company’s strong full-conversation encryption and widely touted commitment to privacy proved attractive to the hundreds of millions of users who flocked to Telegram, including eventually the terrorists who attacked Telegram in 2015. in November planned the terrorist attacks in Paris.
The revelation prompted the normally reclusive Mr. Durov to launch a public relations campaign and give a series of interviews, including one to CNN, to reassure a suspicious public that Telegram was not becoming the WhatsApp of terrorists.
According to Durov, Telegram was the most secure messaging platform on the market, and compromises that created a backdoor for governments would undermine the app’s appeal and the company’s commitment to privacy.
“You can’t make it safe from criminals and open to governments,” he said in 2016. Mr. Durov told CNN. “It’s either safe or it’s not safe.”
Relations with the Kremlin
Telegram’s refusal to budge on decryption put it at odds with governments around the world, including Russia, at least initially.
in 2018 Moscow tried to ban Telegram for refusing to provide decryption keys to Russian security services. Mr. Durov promised to ignore the ban.
It seemed that another confrontation between the tech entrepreneur and the Kremlin was coming, but nothing came of it. The ban was lifted in 2020.
In the following years, Telegram became one of the few foreign social media platforms operating in Russia without restrictions. It is now the official communication tool of choice for many Russian government officials.
Mr. Durov’s critics have long questioned whether Telegram can operate so freely in Russia without making some concessions to the Kremlin; Mr. Durov repeatedly denied these accusations, often referring to the conflict that arose in the early 2010s, which forced him to leave Russia.
Before his arrest in Paris, Mr. Durov was in Azerbaijan at the same time as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had arrived in the country on a two-day official visit. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the two had not met.
And while Mr. Durov has publicly turned his back on Russia, the government quickly began working on Mr. Durov’s behalf after his arrest. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Russian embassy in Paris “immediately went to work” when it received word of Mr. Durov’s legal problems.
The issue of Telegram being misused by money launderers, drug dealers and people spreading pedophilia continues to worry Western governments. According to CNN affiliate BFMTV, Durov’s arrest in France was related to a warrant related to Telegram’s lack of moderation.
In a statement, Telegram responded that it is “absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for abuse of that platform.” The statement added that Telegram complies with EU laws and that Mr. Durov has nothing to hide.
Prepared by CNN.
2024-08-29 09:42:28