in 2024 according to Forbes magazine, with 15.5 billion 39-year-old Mr. Durov is the richest and youngest billionaire living in the Middle East, the only one from this list who has accumulated his fortune in the field of technology.
Mr. Durov is not only the richest immigrant in the Middle East, but also richer than the richest Arab in the world, Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris, whose fortune is estimated at 8.8 billion. dollars.
But who is Mr. Durov, why did he live in the UAE and how did he amass his impressive billion-dollar fortune?
An icon in the homeland
Because of his story, Mr. Durov is called an icon in Russia, Forbes writes.
The 39-year-old self-taught billionaire is of Russian descent and is known for founding the encrypted messaging app Telegram. in 2013 The free app is now used by more than 900 million people worldwide. of active monthly users. Telegram competes with Facebook’s WhatsApp app. It was created to offer a communication platform that does not depend on the hands of the government.
in 2018 Mr. Durov together with his brother Nikolay raised 1.7 billion from investors. dollars and created the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain system. The project was closed in 2020. after it was banned by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
“I would like to end this post by wishing success to all who seek decentralization, balance and equality in the world. You are fighting the right fight. This battle may be the most important battle of our generation,” P. Durov said in his announcement when TON was closed.
Confrontation with the Kremlin’s iron fist
But this wasn’t the tech billionaire’s first run-in with regulators. in 2006 At the age of 22, Mr. Durov created Vkontakte, Russia’s largest social network site.
Despite its success and his comparison to Mark Zuckerberg, Durov eventually lost control of the company to investors linked to the Russian government, particularly in 2014. conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Mr. Durov left Russia after refusing to cooperate with Russian secret services and provide encrypted user data of his first social network.
“Once one agency begins to monitor private communications out of control, that access quickly falls into the hands of third parties — bribers, hackers, agents of other countries,” he said in a statement.
In a post on the Vkontakte blog, he mentioned that he was fired from the position of CEO, and said that he was pushed out for technical reasons, which he only learned about from media reports.
He left the actual running of the company to Alisher Usmanov, one of Russia’s sanctioned billionaires.
From 2021 in december A. Usmanov sold the majority of his Vkontakte shares to the state insurance company Sogaz, which is partly owned by one of Vladimir Putin’s allies, Yuriy Kovalchuk.
Connection with Ukraine
in 2017 Mr. Durov moved to Dubai together with Telegram and has remained generally apolitical since then. He was first recognized as a billionaire by Forbes in 2018, at which time he had $1.7 billion in his account. dollars.
in 2021 Telegram said it is considering various options to go public as its business grows rapidly. The founder added that raising a loan through a bond offering is one possible way to “remain fully independent and true to our values while implementing a monetization strategy,” according to a report by The Information. The Dubai-based startup was mainly financed from Mr. Durov’s personal wealth.
Starting in 2022 Since the war in Ukraine, Telegram has become an extremely important source of information related to the conflict, as well as a lot of disinformation. Mr. Durov also published a Telegram post mentioning his personal connection to the ongoing conflict. “On my mother’s side, I trace my family line from Kiev. Her maiden name is Ukrainian (Ivanenko), and we still have many relatives living in Ukraine. Therefore, this tragic conflict is personal for both me and Telegram,” he wrote.
Colorful details of life
Mr. Durovas wears only black clothes and used to regularly travel around the world. He has encountered armed gangs and the Kremlin, and once threw paper airplanes folded out of money out of his office window. This is how the Business Insider portal has previously described the Russian billionaire arrested on Saturday and provided interesting details of his life:
P. Durovas was born in 1984. October 10 in Russia.
He learned programming at school and used it to change the school’s network welcome screens to insult a teacher he didn’t like. He was close to his older brother Nikolai Durov, who also knew how to program.
Mr. Durovas is known for his unique clothing style. He wears only black clothes, just like the character Neo from The Matrix.
in 2006 after graduating from university, the Durov brothers founded VKontakte, a Russian-language social network that functioned similar to Facebook. It became incredibly popular and made them millions.
VKontakte was located on the fifth and sixth floors of the Singer House, a cult building in the center of St. Petersburg.
in 2012 Mr. Durovas and some of his employees threw paper airplanes folded out of money worth more than 1,000 euros into the crowd from his office window. Each paper airplane was made from a 5,000 ruble banknote.
The VKontakte network was used by participants of anti-government protests who organized events in support of political activist Alexei Navalny, a critic of V. Putin.
in 2011 Mr. Durovs, in response to the government’s demands for more control over his website, shared a photo of a hooded dog showing its tongue. His message to the Kremlin was clear: he is not going to do what he is asked.
P. Durovas said that armed men dressed in camouflage clothes came to his apartment that night.
He gradually lost control of VKontakte to investors linked to Mail.ru, a company that had ties to the Kremlin. But he remained defiant, posting a now-deleted photo on Instagram showing investors the middle finger.
in 2013 Mr. Durov was accused of being behind the wheel of a white Mercedes car that hit a police officer in Moscow. He denied the allegations and claimed he didn’t even know how to drive.
Mr. Durov had lost control of VKontakte and ignored requests to come to the police station for questioning. Finally, the police raided the VKontakte office, but Mr. Durov was not there. A few days before, he left the country by plane from Pulkovo airport.
The Durov brothers had a backup plan. They secretly set up a company in Buffalo, New York and flew some loyal VKontakte employees to the US.
The Moscow Times wrote that when Mr. Durov was asked about his mysterious project, he sent a GIF (moving image) from the movie “The Social Network” featuring Facebook president Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake). as) giving investors the middle finger.
The secret project in New York was Telegram, an encrypted chat app that makes it incredibly difficult for governments to spy on users. In a sense, this was a response to the Kremlin’s intrusion into VKontakte.
Mr. Durovas traveled the world with four employees for a long time and used Airbnb to stay in different cities.
For many years, Mr. Durovs has been constantly traveling around the world, changing his place every few months. Returning to Russia would likely be dangerous for him, but he has become something of a hero for the country’s privacy activists.
Personal freedom is above all else
“I prefer to be free than to follow someone’s orders,” Pavel Durov told American journalist Tucker Carlson in April.
He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on the VKontakte website. Finally, he sold the social network before leaving the country.
Since then, Russian and French media have claimed that in 2021 Mr. Durovas became a French citizen.
Does not attach importance to physical goods
According to Forbes, Mr. Durov’s assets are valued at 15.5 billion. dollars. However, the billionaire says that apart from cash or bitcoins, he has no significant assets such as real estate, planes or yachts. The reason for this is the desire to “be free”.
It is true, according to the French media, Mr. Durovas was arrested on Saturday evening after getting off his private plane on the runway of the Paris-Bourges airport.
American technology giants
The businessman believes that Apple and Google are not only two competitors, but above all the two biggest threats to freedom of speech. “These two platforms can censor everything you can read and everything you can access on your smartphone,” he told the American press in April.
Russia’s reaction to P. Durov’s detention
After the French media reported on the arrest of P. Durov, the creator of the messaging program “Telegram”, the Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma, Vladislav Davankov, stated that he had sent an appeal to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a request to ensure P. Durov’s release.
“Hardly anyone has done more than him for the development of digital services in Russia and the world. Now we need to free him. I appealed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to urge the French authorities to release Pavel Durov from custody,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
Ironically, the representative of the State Duma stated that P. Durov’s arrest “may have political reasons and be a means of gaining access to the personal information of Telegram users.” “This cannot be allowed. According to media reports, law enforcement authorities believe Mr. Durov is involved in “drug trafficking, crimes against children and fraud” due to Telegram’s “restraint and lack of cooperation with law enforcement,” he added. V. Davankov also noted that “there are no such “messengers” in the world that do not have such violations.”
“However, for some reason, no one arrests their owners and puts them in jail. And it shouldn’t happen now. If the French authorities refuse to release Pavel Durov from custody, I suggest that every effort be made to hand him over to the UAE or the Russian Federation. With his consent, of course,” he concluded.
The scandalous American journalist Tucker Carlson, famous for his love of Russian propaganda, has already reacted to Mr. Durov’s arrest – he was the one who interviewed the dictator V. Putin, giving him the opportunity to talk about his “vision” of Ukrainian history for two hours. By the way, T. Carlson also recorded an interview with the founder of Telegram.
This is what he said about P. Durov’s arrest:
“Pavel Durov left Russia when the authorities tried to take control of his Telegram social network. But in the end, it was not Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise freedom of speech. It was a Western country, an ally of the Biden administration and an active member of NATO that shut him down. Today, Pavel Durov sits in a French prison and is a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intelligence services. Darkness is rapidly creeping into the once free world.”
2024-08-26 20:56:27