Telegram Chief Beats Elon Musk By Siring 100 Children

Pavel Durov is many things to many people: programming prodigy, billionaire entrepreneur, Kremlin stooge, free-speech fighter, and biological father to at least 100 children.

Durov’s legal troubles are reigniting an old debate, pitting Telegram’s end-to-end encryption against the security concerns of various governments and the European Union’s campaign to rein in big tech. I Photo: NickLubushko Wikimedia Commons

Durov, the elusive founder of Telegram who was detained in France over the weekend, cuts the figure of a mysterious, globe-trotting tech bro with Mark Zuckerberg’s prodigiousness, Jack Dorsey’s bizarre lifestyle habits, and Elon Musk’s libertarian streak—plus a similar obsession with pronatalism and fathering children.

In July, Durov revealed that he had fathered more than 100 children through sperm donations made over the past 15 years, as reported by Joshua Berlinger and Anna Chernova for CNN.

With an estimated net worth of $9.15 billion, according to Bloomberg, and armed with an array of passports and residences,

Durov has lived a life without borders for a decade. He has embarked on an often-shirtless journey to secure the freedom of communication from the prying eyes of governments, democratically elected or otherwise.

Now, Durov’s legal troubles are reigniting an old debate, pitting Telegram’s end-to-end encryption, which keeps communications between users secure even from the company’s employees, against the security concerns of various 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 four years old. The family returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Nathan Hodge also reported for CNN.