(CNN) – Pavel Durov is many things to many people: a programming prodigy, a billionaire businessman, a Kremlin stooge, a fighter for free speech and the biological father of at least 100 children.
Durov, the elusive founder of Telegram who was arrested in France over the weekend, cuts the figure of a mysterious tech globetrotter with the prodigiosity of Mark Zuckerberg, the strange lifestyle habits of Jack Dorsey and the libertarian streak of Elon Musk, plus a similar obsession with pronatalism and procreation. Durov said in July who had fathered more than 100 children thanks to sperm donations he had made over the past 15 years.
With an estimated net worth of US$ 9.15 billion According to Bloomberg, And armed with a variety of passports and residencies, Durov has lived a borderless life for a decade, a man who often does shirtless travel to ensure freedom of communication from the prying eyes of governments, whether democratically elected or not.
Now, Durov’s legal troubles are reviving an old debate and challenging Telegram’s end-to-end encryption, which keeps communications between users even among company employees safe, against the security concerns of several governments and the European Union’s campaign to rein in Big Tech.
Durov was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union but moved to Italy when he was 4, the tech entrepreneur told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson in an interview earlier this year. The family returned to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, after Durov's father received an offer to work at St. Petersburg State University.
Durov said he and his older brother, Nikolai, were math prodigies from an early age. He claimed his brother appeared on Italian television to solve cubic equations in real time as a child and won repeated Gold medals at the International Mathematical OlympiadThe youngest Durov was the top student at his school and competed at the local level.
“We both had a passion for coding and designing things,” Durov said.
He said that when the family returned to Russia, they brought an IBM PC XT computer from Italy, which meant that “in the early 1990s, they were one of the few families in Russia who could actually learn to program.”
Durov's programming prowess and entrepreneurial spirit led him to create Vkontakte (VK), a social networking site, in 2006, when he was 21 and fresh out of college. VK quickly became known as Russia's Facebook and Durov as the country's answer to Mark Zuckerberg.
But Durov's relationship with the Kremlin turned adversarial much faster than Zuckerberg's with Washington.
When protesters began using VK to organize demonstrations in Kyiv against Ukraine's pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich in 2013, Durov said the Kremlin had asked the site to hand over private data of Ukrainian users.
“We decided to refuse and that did not sit well with the Russian government,” Durov told Carlson.
That decision sealed Durov's fate at the company. Durov would later resign 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 then left Russia. Today, VK is under state control.
“For me, it was never about getting rich. Everything in my life was about being free. As much as possible, my mission in life is to enable other people to be free,” Durov said.
“I don’t want to take orders from anyone.”
When Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp in his attempt to build the social media empire now known as Meta, Durov chose to build his own messaging app even though the market was already saturated for such platforms.
He didn't believe there was anything good enough.
“It doesn’t matter how many messaging apps there are if they’re all bad,” Durov told TechCrunch. in 2015.
Durov said his experience with the Kremlin was a key factor in the creation of Telegram, which is now based in Dubai. He and his brother wanted to create something that was free from the prying eyes of the government.
The company’s strong end-to-end encryption and much-publicized commitment to privacy proved attractive to the hundreds of millions of users who flocked to Telegram — including, eventually, the terrorists who planned the Paris attacks in November 2015.
The revelation prompted the usually reserved Durov to embark on a public relations campaign and conduct a series of interviews, including one with CNN, to reassure a wary public that Telegram was not becoming a WhatsApp for terrorists.
According to Durov, Telegram was simply the most secure messaging platform on the market and compromising it by creating a backdoor for governments would undermine the app's appeal and the company's commitment to privacy.
“You can’t make it secure from criminals and open to governments,” Durov told CNN in 2016. “Either it’s secure or it’s not secure.”
Telegram's refusal to compromise 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. Durov has vowed to defy the ban.
Another showdown between the tech entrepreneur and the Kremlin seemed to be brewing, but it never came to fruition. The ban was lifted in 2020.
In the following years, Telegram became one of the few foreign social media platforms that operated in Russia without restrictions. Today, it is the preferred official means of communication for many Russian government officials.
Durov's critics have long questioned whether Telegram could operate so freely in Russia without making any concessions to the Kremlin, accusations Durov has repeatedly rejected. He also often refers to their dispute in the early 2010s that led him to leave Russia.
Before his arrest in Paris, Durov was in Azerbaijan at the same time that Russian President Vladimir Putin was in the country for a two-day official visit. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that they had not met.
And although Durov has publicly turned his back on Russia, the government was quick to get to work after his arrest. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Russian embassy in Paris “immediately got to work” after Durov’s legal troubles became known.
The problem of Telegram being abused by money launderers, drug dealers and pedophiles is still a concern for Western governments. Durov's arrest in France is related to a court order related to Telegram's lack of moderation, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
Telegram responded in a statement that “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform.” The statement added that Telegram complies with EU laws and that Durov had nothing to hide.
CNN's Nathan Hodge contributed to this report.
