Proud to introduce to you Durov

Pavel Durov

This is Pavel Durov, the millionaire co-founder of Telegram who fled Moscow for defying the Kremlin and provokes Putin with his semi-naked selfies on Instagram.

Success

This was what catapulted him to fame: he went on to become the "most relevant businessman" in Russia, according to The New York Times. But that also caused him political problems. Specifically, when the Kremlin demanded access to Vkontakte data on Ukrainian leaders in a series of protests following Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Pavel told Reuters at the time that he was fired from his position as CEO of Vkontakte after several entities backed by the Russian government tried to take control of the social network. The group Mail.ru , owned by oligarch Alisher Usmanov, bought the social network for 1.4 billion euros the following year.

The businessperson told the New York newspaper that he was forced to leave Moscow in 2014, when a team of Russian special operations showed up at his doorstep.

Pavel's run-ins with the Kremlin did not end with Vkontakte.

In 2018, Telegram was banned in Russia after he again denied the Kremlin access to user data. In response, hundreds of people demonstrated against it, some of them with posters illustrating Durov as a saint (as in the image above). The app was able to be used again 2 years later in Russia.

Net worth

He is the richest person in the United Arab Emirates, as published in 2021 Khaleej Times.

And the 122nd fortune in the world, according to Khaleej Times. In 2021, he was one of eleven billionaires residing in Dubai.

In August 2017, a post by Durov on Instagram in which he parodied the President of Russia Vladimir Putin went viral.

The description read "Putin Shirtless Challenge" and encouraged other users to share images of themselves with their chests uncovered, as Putin usually does.

"Putin's 2 rules: no photoshop, no muscle pulling. Otherwise, you are not an alpha," he wrote in August 2017. About 3,000 posts were uploaded to Instagram with the hashtag that Durov had proposed. As of today, it has more than 120,000 likes.

Despite having 1.3 million followers on Twitter, Durov only follows one person - Elon Musk.

He posted a photo from the deck of a yacht of the shipping company Lürssen off the Italian coast in 2016.

The price of luxury yachts from Lürssen does not fall below 900,000 euros and can cost up to 170 million euros, according to Yacht World. Pavel Durov has never confirmed whether he is the owner of the yacht on whom he is sailing.

Although Durov said in a 2016 publication that he was not "a huge fan of Lürssen yachts", he did like the sailboat manufactured by the shipping company. Currently, Lürssen has only a single sailing yacht launched in the 21st century.

Durov also posted on Instagram another image of a luxury yacht in 2015.

Bloomberg reported that Durov's "semi-nude" profile appeared on the dating app.

"I'm not looking for anything serious or non-serious here," he wrote on his profile, according to the outlet. "I'm just messing around with the app," he added.

Durov wrote the post as a response to the film directed by journalist and YouTuber Yury Dud about Silicon Valley. The film has already accumulated forty-five million views on YouTube.

In his blog post, Durov stated seven reasons why he does not want to move to Silicon Valley.

"The United States is not the best place to live or run a tech business," Pavel Durov wrote. "Local programmers are expensive, spoiled and often unable to focus on work due to the external flow of suggestions and ideas."

The Russian-born businessperson also called the United States a "police state" and said that he was the victim of a robbery in San Francisco in 2015: 2 people tried to steal his mobile.

A part of the controversy is born of the character that has been built on social networks. Telegram, for example, is the "favourite app" of terrorist networks, such as the Islamic State, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.

"We can't make messaging technology safe for everyone except terrorists," he said in an interview with CNN in February 2016. "It's either safe or it's not."

But he is also a kind of instigator in his personal accounts.

In 2014, when the Russian government censored Vkontakte, Durov's response was to post an image of a dog in a hoodie on Twitter. When Vkontakte was accused of having pornography, she changed her Twitter description from "CEO of VK" to "King of Porn," according to The Calvet Journal.

In 2017, he posted his passport photo on Twitter and noted that it was "strangely appropriate for newspaper articles commenting that terrorists use Telegram."