Telegram, Pavel Durov and the shaky future for tech’s libertarian princelings
The messaging app’s founder has become a poster boy for the backlash in Europe over CEO accountability — and a target for Russia
Pavel Durov, the billionaire boss of messaging app Telegram, steps off his plane in France and is swarmed by a Swat team of police officers. He pulls off his shirt to reveal a torso so sculpted that it momentarily confuses his opponents before they come to their senses, cuff him and march him off to a cell. “Privacy is over!” a faceless goon shouts, zapping him with an electric current. Durov awakes to find a chip implanted in his head and the task of breaking out of a high-security prison before him.
This is the plot of Total Glitch, a game hosted on Telegram that dramatises a fictitious French prison break by a hero who recovers from bouts of intense combat with ice baths and yoga. Durov, a 41-year-old wellness evangelist who in real life recovers from bouts of intense exercise with ice baths and yoga, says he had no role in the game’s development, but he has promoted it on his channel. “Only on Telegram could independent developers pull this off . . . and the results are wild,” he wrote last October in a Telegram post viewed more than five million times.
The scenario the game imagines is not entirely far-fetched. In August 2024, Durov, who was born in Russia but has French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was detained by French police within minutes of stepping off a private jet at Paris-Le Bourget Airport. He was held over alleged failures to moderate criminal activity on Telegram, from drug trafficking to terrorism and the dissemination of child sexual abuse material. After four days in custody, he was released and placed under formal investigation on a dozen preliminary charges and barred from leaving France. A trial, which is unlikely to come before the end of the year, could determine whether Durov will be convicted and face fines, or even a long prison sentence.
One of the biggest messaging platforms in the world, with more than a billion users, Telegram is marketed as a safe haven for communication, as well as a one-stop shop for broadcasting, file sharing, shopping, gaming and more. But its claims to be ideologically and technologically unassailable from the prying eyes of authorities, combined with a hands-off approach to moderation, have made it the default channel for anyone operating at the margins of legality, according to critics. It’s where you might find gruesome videos of explosions and beheadings alongside semi-official communications from militaries and intelligence agencies.
The French charges against Durov have serious implications for every other social media platform and the liability of their top executives. “Arresting a CEO of a major platform over the actions of its users was not only unprecedented — it was legally and logically absurd,” Durov wrote in a Telegram post, a year after his brush with police.
Since then, European lawmakers have shown ever more interest in holding tech CEOs accountable for alleged abuses on their platforms. This month, French and European investigators raided the offices of Elon Musk’s X in Paris, as part of a wide-ranging investigation into its algorithms as well as the spread of AI-generated sexual abuse material. Spain is introducing laws to ban under-16s from social media and hold executives personally liable for hateful content. Last week, Russia stepped up its disruption of Telegram, throttling some features as part of an effort to force users on to a state-backed “national messenger” built for surveillance, and accusing Durov of pursuing his own self-interest while enabling terrorism and crimes against children.
For the libertarian tech titans of the US, and their political allies, Durov has become a martyr to European censorship. In the 18 months since he was released from custody, he has displayed increasing disdain for French authorities, accusing them of pressuring him to silence certain European conservative voices on Telegram and suggesting his detention was politically motivated. (French officials point to a strict separation between the judicial and political systems. The prosecutor’s office leading the investigation declined to comment for this story.) After the recent raid on Musk’s Paris office, Durov posted that France was “the only country in the world that is criminally persecuting all social networks that give people some degree of freedom… Don’t be mistaken: this is not a free country.”
To some observers, the investigation looks like a responsible attempt to force a secretive leader to shed some light on the allegiances and inner workings of his multibillion-dollar empire. Unlike the bosses of rival platforms such as Meta or xAI, Durov wholly owns Telegram, funding it through a personal fortune estimated at $17bn, which comes from his ownership stake, as well as personal bitcoin investments. And although he has frequently dangled the idea of an initial public offering, it remains unclear if he is ready to loosen his grip. In early 2024, in an interview with the FT, he claimed to have rebuffed offers of equity investments that valued the company at more than $30bn. According to analysis of documents obtained by the FT, interviews with former insiders and publicly available information, he has tied Telegram’s revenue prospects in part to a niche cryptocurrency whose underlying technology was originally developed by his team, rather than relying on mainstream advertisers who might demand more disclosure.
As the months pass, the circle of people wanting answers from Durov is growing. Corporate bondholders, who he has tapped for more than $3bn, including a $1.7bn offering last May, are asking whether the company will ever make good on the plan to float on public markets, now further delayed by the investigation. Some had been attracted by an option to buy shares in any future flotation at a discount of as much as 20 per cent. One bondholder raised concerns that the company’s IPO promises represent an “investment trap”.
Durov is now caught between two fires. In the west, the scant information around Telegram and its owner has done little to quell speculation that Durov still has ties to Moscow, despite his repeated denials. In Russia, a criminal case was opened this week against him for “aiding terrorism” and allowing Telegram to become a tool of western intelligence. In response, Durov claimed that Russian authorities were “fabricating new pretexts to restrict Russia’s access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech”. Amid the conflicting narratives, Durov’s critics argue, it is hard to believe in anything other than his singular ruthlessness.
“Durov lives in a world of spin where he will decide on a story then grow a back-story and it will become the truth,” said Axel Neff, a Telegram co-founder who is now estranged from Durov. “He views himself as a man of the people. But how does one person become the sole shareholder of a company probably worth around $50bn? You’ve got to step on some people. To the victor, go the spoils.”
The “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia”, as Durov became known in his twenties after founding the country’s answer to Facebook, VKontakte, cast himself as an impish, anti-establishment folk hero from the start. Born in St Petersburg to a Ukrainian mother and Russian father who was a prominent professor of philology, Durov always intended to build “a one-man show and to do it alone, and that hasn’t changed”, said Nikolay Kononov, author of a 2025 book about Durov and Telegram, The Populist. “He’s a one-man state . . . the king of the outlaws.”
Durov seemed unafraid to publicly troll authorities, even while the Kremlin tightened its grip on the internet sector during the early 2000s. In 2011, in response to demands from Moscow that he shut down the accounts of Russian opposition leaders on VK, as the platform became known, Durov posted a picture of a “resistance dog” in a hoodie with its tongue out. When Russian police raided VK’s offices in 2013 over an alleged hit-and-run incident with a policeman, Durov posted, “When you run over a policeman, it is important to drive back and forth — so that all the pulp comes out.” Telegram has denied he had any involvement in the hit-and-run and called the accusation an attempt to discredit Durov during a period of corporate upheaval at VK.
It was in 2012, Durov has said, that he and his older brother, Nikolai, a maths prodigy, started developing Telegram as a “private tool” for the pair to communicate securely. In his telling, Durov left Russia in early 2014 after more pressure from Moscow to share Ukrainian user data with the government, selling his VK stake under duress to oligarchs. He eventually settled in Dubai.
Telegram ‘is more like a religion than a company to’ Durov
Shortly after his exit, Durov was sued by United Capital Partners, a Russian investment group that had bought a 48 per cent stake in VK. It argued he had “embezzled corporate funds, breached his fiduciary duties to shareholders and diverted corporate opportunities to himself” by setting up Telegram using VK resources. Durov was “attempting to present himself as a political dissident in order to divert attention from his serious legal challenges,” UCP said. Durov countersued in a US court, alleging UCP was trying to coerce and defraud him out of his ownership of Telegram. As part of a 2014 settlement, all parties agreed to drop their claims. But Durov got his prize: the reins of Telegram.
These days, there is no question of who is in control at Telegram. To work there is to join the cult of Pavel. The boss sports a custom-designed, all-black ensemble, inspired by Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix. He enjoys a lifestyle of ascetic ritual: at least 200 push-ups and 100 sit-ups each morning. No alcohol, tobacco or coffee.
Where Silicon Valley rivals such as Meta and X have thousands of staffers, Durov has around 60 full-time underlings. The identities of his staff are shrouded in secrecy. On its own LinkedIn page, the company states: “Telegram has a No LinkedIn policy. Accounts claiming to be past or present employees never worked at Telegram.” But, according to people familiar with the matter, many are young, brilliant software engineers plucked from relative obscurity by Durov and his brother from coding championships. These hires are paid lavishly. They spend summers working away from Dubai to escape the heat, once at a castle in Umbria.
“There is practically zero churn. They share the same values and believe in the mission of the company,” Durov told the FT, in the 2024 interview several months before his detainment in France. He claimed to be “deeply” involved in all Telegram’s processes. “It’s more like a religion than a company to him,” said one Dubai associate. When Durov missed the twice-weekly company meeting during his detention, it was one of only two times he had ever done so in 12 years, according to people familiar with the matter.
Dated mid-2025, previously unreported documents revealing Telegram’s leadership team support the claim that Durov’s top lieutenants have stuck around. Igor Diakonov, chief infrastructure officer and head of infrastructure management, joined in 2013. So did Mike Ravdonikas, who, as chief operations officer, runs Telegram’s external comms, regulatory affairs and moderation, as well as maintaining a website showcasing his own poetry. Durov’s three top engineering leaders also joined in 2013, all from VK. No executive has left since 2014, according to one person familiar with the matter.
While Durov is the public face of Telegram, the intellectual power is his brother Nikolai, according to multiple people who know the brothers. Those who know the chief scientist describe him as a mathematical savant: shy, dishevelled, often lost in his thoughts. As a student, he won prestigious maths competitions, before twice winning the International Collegiate Programming Contest, the Olympic Games of programming. (Neither French prosecutors nor Telegram would comment on a Politico report that there is a warrant out for Nikolai.)
“They are like two hemispheres of one brain,” said Kononov. “Nikolai is about tech inventions, and Pavel is about translating these into products, marketing and fulfilling his political dreams.” Neff agreed: “When you have someone like [Nikolai] in your back pocket, you can basically do anything in the tech world. Pavel generates the demand and the spotlight.”
With Nikolai at his side, Durov has made a roaring success out of Telegram. Surpassing one billion monthly users in March 2025, the platform has become a key communications channel for officials and the military, particularly in Russia, Ukraine and other eastern European countries, and a democratic lifeline during moments of civil unrest, from Hong Kong to Iran and Belarus.
Insiders say the app’s superpower has been rolling out product updates at breakneck speed, expanding beyond private messaging into a one-stop shop with public groups, broadcast channels, gaming, shopping and payments services. “What Durov is good at is lateral arbitrage — taking something that works in one market and launching it into a new market and improving on that,” said Neff.
In 2021, cyber security experts argued that despite Telegram’s promises of absolute privacy in its private messages (not even the company is supposed to be able to access them), its end-to-end encryption displayed cryptographic weaknesses. As the app broadened its services to include group-chat capabilities and broadcast channels, critics noted that users might mistakenly assume these features were also end-to-end encrypted by default, and that Telegram had failed to correct the record.
Last week, a Russian minister claimed that foreign intelligence services were able to see Telegram messages sent by Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. “Telegram’s not a private messenger,” Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike said on a podcast in February. “It’s the opposite.”
Telegram told the FT that its employees “cannot access” any user messages. Even those that are not fully end-to-end encrypted and instead stored in the cloud are protected because its decryption keys are split into parts and never kept in the same place as the data they protect, it has said. “No breaches of Telegram’s encryption have ever been found,” it said. “The Russian government’s allegation that our encryption has been compromised is a deliberate fabrication intended to justify outlawing Telegram and forcing citizens on to a state-controlled messaging platform engineered for mass surveillance and censorship.”
In 2018, Nikolai Durov developed Gram, Telegram’s own cryptocurrency and underlying blockchain, while Pavel raised $1.7bn in private sales of rights to Gram ahead of its launch. But the following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Telegram and blocked it from distributing the tokens, alleging Gram was an unregistered security. Telegram settled the case, paying an $18.5mn fine and agreeing to return $1.2bn to investors, including Silicon Valley venture capital firms such as Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins.
Gram’s underlying code was revived by the open-source community, with a cryptocurrency called Ton emerging as the most popular token. Durov still has close affiliations with the Ton community. Andrew Rogozov, a former VK executive and a Durov associate, was a founding member of The Ton Foundation, an open-source group driving Toncoin’s development. He now runs The Open Platform, a start-up that builds Toncoin tools for Telegram. Meanwhile, Durov has publicly championed the coin and integrated numerous Ton features into Telegram. Developers are encouraged to build games and experiences into the app that use the currency; advertising on Telegram is paid for using Toncoin; a Toncoin wallet has been built into the app for peer-to-peer and ecommerce payments; creators are able to sell and earn in the currency.
In 2025, Toncoin began to gain mainstream popularity. In March, VC firms invested more than $400mn in the currency, according to Durov, who cited top investor groups Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Ribbit, Draper and Vy. Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia partner known for his pro-Trump stance, said in a statement that the open-source team working on Ton was “best in the world at the intersection of consumer product thinking and crypto infrastructure”. He added: “When you combine this with the global distribution of Telegram, we’re very excited to see where they go.” The coin has now been listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Kraken, Gemini and Coinbase, as Durov makes inroads in Silicon Valley.
The Toncoin ecosystem has propped up what would otherwise be modest revenues and growth for Telegram, according to financial filings obtained by the FT. In theory, as demand for the crypto rises due to its integration on the platform, so does the price of Toncoin, which Telegram holds in plentiful supply. In the first half of 2025, nearly one-third of Telegram’s revenue, or $300mn, came from Toncoin-related deals, according to documents and people familiar with the matter. Premium subscription nearly doubled to $223mn sales in the first half of 2025, as the company added news features for power users, while advertising revenue ticked up only 5 per cent to $125mn over the period.
On a call with bondholders late last year, a transcript of which was seen by the FT, Telegram’s chief investment officer John Hyman said “the bulk” of crypto revenues were through a long-term contract with the Ton Foundation that would continue until 2029. “We see huge potential for Ton, for the position we still have in Ton,” said Hyman, a former Morgan Stanley banker who single-handedly oversees Telegram’s debt financing.
Yet the cryptomarket is notoriously volatile, and Toncoin’s price has been weighed down by wider market bearishness. Despite an operating profit of nearly $400mn in the first half of 2025, Telegram’s net losses were $222mn, compared with a $334mn net profit in the same period of 2024. One person familiar with the matter said this was because the company had to write down the value of its holdings of Toncoin, the price of which is down by about 80 per cent since its peak at $7.88 in July 2024.
“There’s very little organic demand [for Toncoin] outside of Telegram’s own internal mechanisms,” said Elies Campo, who helped work on Telegram’s growth, partnerships and business development between 2015 and 2020. “The circularity is the core problem . . . If either side weakens, the other follows.”
Last summer, Nasdaq-listed Verb Technologies, a marketing video software group, agreed to a $558mn investment from a vehicle run by Manuel Stotz, then president of the Ton Foundation. In return, Verb switched to become a digital assets treasury company holding Toncoin. Verb, since renamed Ton Strategy Co, has invested more than $700mn in the cryptocurrency. Announcing the deal, Stotz, who is now Ton Strategy’s executive chairman, described Durov as the “GOAT (“Greatest of All Time”) — in the domain of social media & product”, and posted a topless photo of the founder: “His proof-of-work [is], well, quite visible😁”
Telegram told the FT that its “long-term business model is not dependent on cryptocurrencies”, adding that its “main focus” is selling premium subscriptions, as well as advertising. The company called Campo’s analysis: “uneducated, unreliable and just plain wrong”.
Some bondholders remain bullish about Telegram’s business prospects. One told the FT that the platform had opportunities for swift revenue growth given it was highly undermonetised. Another added, “What makes these guys different is they are better in connecting the whole ecosystem to the messaging platform, and they seem more capable than other platforms in finding ways to monetise the ecosystem.”
Campo was not convinced: “Strip out the Ton sales and crypto deals and you have roughly $350mn in real product revenue” in the first half of 2025, he said. “It’s a house of cards . . . Pavel has navigated impossible situations before. The margin for error is just extremely thin.”
It was mid-May 2025, at the Cannes Film Festival, and Durov was attending a charity auction in the resplendent Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc with his girlfriend, the glamorous crypto influencer and aspiring actress Yulia Vavilova. As the auctioneer reeled off the lots, Durov casually bid $400,000 to buy her a role in an upcoming Spike Lee movie. The auctioneer slammed down a gavel and the ballroom erupted into cheers of delight. Durov did not so much as flinch.
It was more than an extravagant romantic gesture. The theatrics served as a reminder to anyone watching — French authorities included — that nine months after his detainment Durov would not be cowed. Since the previous summer, he had been living in luxury lockdown in one of Paris’s palace hotels. Vavilova had posted pictures of five-star spas and horse riding near the palace of Versailles. That year “felt like a survival race straight out of Squid Game,” she wrote on Telegram, “while other moments were more like an enchanting Emily in Paris story.” The travel ban was relaxed in July 2025.
A Telegram bondholder put it differently. “He’s so rich that he feels he owns the world. In some ways, it’s true . . . Poor Pavel, he’s forced to live in some Parisian palace. I’m sure he’s enjoying it and living like Putin does in Russia.”
Durov has appeared “increasingly paranoid” since his detainment and “seems to mostly be talking to a very narrow circle of people”, said Aleksandra Urman, a researcher at the University of Zurich who has studied extremism on Telegram. She noted he had also strategically embraced American libertarians, granting video interviews to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, and meeting in Paris with podcaster Lex Fridman. “He’s trying to pivot to a certain part of his western audience. In the west, he knows his main user groups have been extreme-right or right-wing groups. It lands well.” Telegram disputed this characterisation, adding that its users “don’t belong to a certain political party, what unites them is a belief in free speech”.
Durov is also close to Xavier Niel, the maverick French tech and telecoms billionaire who was among the first people Durov called after his detainment, according to people familiar with the matter. Niel has taken regular walks with Durov around Paris and advised him on how to navigate the French legal system. Niel, who spent a short stint in prison early in his career related to his early investments in sex shops in France, told the FT in November 2024: “When I went to prison, everyone disappeared on me. So when a friend runs into a problem in France, I’m not the kind of person who doesn’t pick up the phone.”
Durov has also courted Elon Musk, who associates say he long admired. In December 2024, Durov met Musk for lunch when the X boss was visiting Paris for the reopening of the Notre-Dame cathedral. Shortly after a second meeting in May, Durov announced a one-year deal with xAI to integrate the start-up’s controversial Grok chatbot into Telegram. Telegram was to receive $300mn from xAI, as well as half the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via the messaging app, he wrote on X.
That partnership has not materialised. Instead, Telegram recently launched Cocoon, a “decentralised AI network” designed by Nikolai and others, whereby individual owners of the expensive GPU chips that power AI models rent them out to developers in return for Toncoin.
There have also been PR crises. In July 2024, a woman named Irina Bolgar told Forbes Russia that Durov was father to her three children, providing proof of his paternity. Days later, Durov posted on social media about his widespread sperm donation projects, saying it was possible he had “over 100 biological kids” and he planned to “open source” his DNA so that his children could find one another. In August that year, it emerged that Bolgar had filed a criminal lawsuit against Durov in a Swiss court in 2023 alleging he had been violent towards one of their children and had stopped supporting the family financially, according to court documents. Telegram rejected the allegations: “These events, which never occurred, were only ‘remembered’ by Ms Bolgar . . . as she was preparing to initiate legal proceedings for personal financial gain. The suspicious timing raises doubts about the credibility of these accusations.”
He’s so rich that he feels he owns the world. In some ways, it’s true . . . Poor Pavel
One of Durov’s preoccupations, as he has gone after western investment and audiences, has been distancing himself from his native country. In the past, Durov has refused to take sides on the Russia-Ukraine war or comment on Vladimir Putin: “Let’s not go there,” he told the FT in 2024. But he continues to deny any ties to Moscow. “A sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people,” he said on Tuesday after the news of the Russian criminal investigation broke.
In the wake of the French investigation, conjecture about these ties has grown in the west. Upon his detainment in Paris, Moscow raced to offer Durov assistance, demanding consular access to him and suggesting the case was politically motivated. Independent Russian news website iStories reported it had obtained records of Durov having travelled in and out of Russia more than 50 times between 2014 and 2021.
Other critics noted that immediately before his detainment, Durov had been travelling around Central Asia with Vavilova, staying at the Four Seasons in Baku, Azerbaijan, where they drove racing cars, took helicopter rides and sharpened their marksmanship at shooting ranges. The trip appears to have overlapped with Putin’s state visit to Baku on August 18 and 19. The Kremlin has publicly denied there was any meeting between the pair.
Even so, said one European official, if Durov had “problems with Russia . . . I struggle with the messaging. Durov was in Baku, that’s practically Putin’s backyard”. Telegram said that Durov made infrequent trips to St Petersburg to visit family, which he posted about publicly on his Instagram account, noting he has not returned since the start of the war in Ukraine. The company rejected the idea of any meeting between Durov and Putin in Baku. It said: “Mr Durov was in a city of 2.4 million people outside of Russia, not at a backyard barbecue across from the Kremlin.”
Evaluations differ on the strength of the investigation against Durov. His allies believe the case against him is weak, the result of a net cast as wide as possible by French prosecutors who, they claim, lack expertise in digital platforms. “I have never seen so many accusations with so little legal precision,” one of Durov’s lawyers, Christophe Ingrain, told French magazine Le Point.
The prosecutors leading the investigation say they acted after receiving complaints about Telegram’s lack of responsiveness to requests from law enforcement in France and other European countries. Johanna Brousse, the magistrate who leads the cyber crimes division at the Paris prosecutor’s office, is a particularly formidable opponent. Her peers describe her as a determined campaigner unafraid to push boundaries to prosecute across borders and at the cutting edge of technology. “She’s like Joan of Arc . . . she’s impassioned about her work with a strong sense of the collective,” one said.
Durov’s patience with the French justice system seems to have worn thin. Last year, he accused top French intelligence officials of pressuring him to censor certain conservative Moldovan and Romanian accounts on Telegram ahead of fraught elections in each country. “I refused. We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe,” he wrote on X.
In a rare public statement France’s intelligence agency DGSE said it “strongly refutes allegations that requests to ban accounts linked to any electoral process were made”. Instead, it had “been obliged, on several occasions” to contact Durov “to remind him firmly of his company’s responsibilities, and his own personal responsibilities, in terms of preventing terrorist and child pornography threats”.
In the coming weeks, Telegram is due to repay the principal on some of its bonds. Whether investors will be as forthcoming in the future as they have been in the past remains to be seen. For its part, Telegram insists on its independence in the near term. “Following next month’s bond payment, we will remain highly liquid, with cash on hand that materially exceeds our outstanding bond obligations,” it said. “Our balance sheet is strong, we are generating substantial cash flow, and we have neither the need nor the intention to seek external financing.”
One person familiar with Durov’s thinking claims the drawn out investigation has begun to weigh on him. “He feels all this is very unfair and misguided,” they said. Publicly, though, Durov has remained steadfast. “Up until this day we don’t understand what we did wrong . . . the investigation is ongoing and it’s been frustratingly slow,” he said, via video link to the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2025. His appearance was introduced by a projected image of Durov dressed as a Greek deity, oiled chest barely covered by a white toga, with a goat slung over his shoulder.
Asked by the interviewer if he considered himself a hostage in France, or if French intelligence were trying to pressure him to “do what they want”, Durov was solemn. “I seem to be held to higher standards than most other platforms,” he replied. “I would rather die than become anyone’s asset”.
