Pavel Durov

Durov recalled in a long interview that as a young child he moved to Italy with his family, could not speak Italian when he first started school, and later returned to Russia. The multilingual experience is part of his own account of his life.⁠[1]

Durov himself has said he graduated from Saint Petersburg University in the summer of 2006, then wanted to help his university classmates stay in touch online, and that year began building a social network for students and graduates.⁠[2]

While at Saint Petersburg State University, Durov ran a website for students and alumni and observed the demand for real-name social networking and campus networks; after graduating, he launched VK with Nikolai and early collaborators. The university website is part of the product’s prehistory and should not be conflated with the later VK company’s users and assets.⁠[3]

Official Telegram materials list Pavel Durov as founder, owner, and CEO. He earlier co-founded VK with Nikolai and launched Telegram in 2013; Pavel was mainly responsible for product, organization, and public communication, while Nikolai concentrated more on the underlying protocol and engineering.⁠[4]

Pavel was responsible for product direction, interface, growth, and running the company, while Nikolai provided the core technology and scaling capability; VK grew rapidly on the Russian-language internet.⁠[5]

VK was a company with shareholders and a board of directors, not a protocol permanently under Durov’s private control. The later share sales and his removal by the board show that “founder,” “CEO,” and “controlling party” were not the same concept in different years.⁠[5]

Durov has said that around 2011 to 2012, VK began receiving government demands related to protest activity and political content, and that the team refused to carry out some of them. This account reflects his later free-expression stance.⁠[1]

Durov regarded his experiences with government pressure and secure communication as the direct motivation for creating Telegram; Pavel handled product, financing, and operations, and Nikolai handled the protocol and technology. Telegram’s regular cloud chats and Secret Chats use different encryption models, and not all messages are end-to-end encrypted by default.⁠[1]

ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry reported in January 2014 that Durov had sold his roughly 12% stake in VK to Ivan Tavrin, further strengthening the control of shareholders linked to Alisher Usmanov. After the sale he briefly remained CEO but no longer held the same level of ownership.⁠[6]

The transaction price and estimates of his private wealth have not been fully disclosed.⁠[6]

In April 2014, the VK board ended Durov’s tenure as CEO, and he subsequently left Russia. Reuters reported his account that the dismissal was related to his refusal to hand over data on Ukrainian protesters to the security services and his refusal to block political pages. Telegram’s current company profile repeats this account.⁠[7]

The causal explanation involving refused data requests comes from the Durov and Telegram side; what can be independently confirmed is the change in shareholder control, the board’s dismissal, and his departure from Russia.⁠[7]

Pavel and Nikolai launched Telegram in 2013: Pavel was responsible for direction, product, and financing, while Nikolai developed MTProto and led the technical architecture. Telegram currently describes Pavel as founder, owner, and CEO, and the company is based in Dubai.⁠[4]

“OwnerOwnerOwner, also known as Owner.com, is a software company serving independent restaurants and other local businesses. Co-founded by Adam Guild and Dean Bloembergen, it combines websites, online ordering, customer relationship management, marketing and branded mobile apps, later adding point-of-sale systems and AI agents.Open the full entry” comes from the company’s own description; Telegram is not a publicly listed company, and its detailed capitalization table and related entities have not all been disclosed.⁠[4]

Telegram’s financing was long led by Durov, and the company later built revenue through debt, Premium subscriptions, advertising, and ecosystem services. The company said it surpassed 1 billion monthly active users and became profitable in 2025; these are operating figures published by the platform.⁠[8]

Public materials can show that he invested in and raised funds for Telegram, but they are not sufficient to establish a complete personal portfolio of stocks, funds, tokens, or angel investments.⁠[8]

To build payment and application infrastructure suited to Telegram’s large user base, the Durov brothers and their team designed TON. Pavel wrote the project primer and organized fundraising and public communication aimed at investors, while Nikolai was responsible for the series of technical white papers and the architecture.⁠[9]

As head of Telegram, Durov drove the 2018 TON/Gram purchase agreement fundraising, aiming to connect a large messaging user base with payment and blockchain services; Nikolai was the core author of the technical white papers and architecture. Purchasers received rights to future token delivery, not Telegram equity.⁠[10]

His business and fundraising role does not mean he personally wrote all the blockchain code, and the roughly US$1.7 billion raised was not personal income.⁠[10]

In 2019 the SEC sued Telegram Group and TON Issuer, alleging that their sale of Grams constituted an unregistered securities offering. Court proceedings blocked the planned issuance; Telegram ultimately settled, paid a penalty, and returned funds to investors, and in 2020 it stopped supporting the testnet and withdrew from the project.⁠[11]

After the SEC lawsuit, the court issued a preliminary injunction, and Telegram terminated the original TON plan in 2020; the final settlement required it to return more than US$1.2 billion to investors, pay an US$18.5 million penalty, and take on a three-year notification obligation. The settlement was on a neither-admit-nor-deny basis.⁠[12]

This was not a personal criminal conviction of Durov, nor an issuance license for the current community TON. After Telegram withdrew, Durov stated publicly that the team was no longer involved; the later community chain, Toncoin, and the 2026 renaming to Gram are not the original fundraising project.⁠[12]

Although the company no longer operates a blockchain, Telegram later chose the community TON as the crypto-asset infrastructure for Mini Apps. Rules in 2025 required the relevant Mini Apps to use only TON and to connect wallets through TON Connect, so the platform provides distribution and a product entry point.⁠[13]

This is a company platform policy, not a reissuance of the 2018 Gram, and it does not make Durov the sole controller of current on-chain governance. He can change Telegram’s integration rules, but network parameters are still enforced by validators and on-chain mechanisms.⁠[13]

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Durov said he owned all of Telegram’s equity, and discussed experiences including maintaining independence with personal funds and bond financing, being approached by law enforcement in the United States, and being attacked in San Francisco. These are his own statements.⁠[1]

An August 2024 press release from the Paris prosecutor’s office said Durov had been placed under formal judicial investigation and judicial supervision, with the listed matters involving alleged complicity or non-cooperation, including the platform’s use for illegal transactions, child sexual abuse material, fraud, and organized crime, and refusal to provide information on request. The French “mise en examen” is an investigative stage and does not amount to a conviction.⁠[14]

Bail or travel arrangements do not mean the case has been dropped; final liability awaits subsequent court rulings.⁠[14]

While the French investigation continued, judicial authorities in March 2025 allowed Durov to leave the country temporarily for Dubai. The permission changed his travel conditions under judicial supervision; it did not withdraw the formal investigation, declare him innocent, or end the case.⁠[15]

On the voting day of Romania’s presidential election, Durov posted that a European country, referred to with a baguette symbol, had asked Telegram to silence conservative voices; the French side denied interfering in the election and noted that the two sides had previously established contact over terrorist threats.⁠[16]

In a long interview with Le Point, Durov responded to questions including his arrest in France, the process for law enforcement requests, content governance, and his refusal to sell Telegram. His explanations represent the position of the person under investigation and the company’s founder.⁠[17]

The Associated Press reported in 2026 that the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed Durov remained under formal investigation; public materials do not show that any guilty verdict has been issued on the matters above. A judicial investigation can lead to charges, partial dismissal, or closure of the case.⁠[18]

Debates over platform governance are distinct from personal criminal liability: content moderation, encryption design, cooperation with law enforcement, and users’ illegal conduct involve different facts and legal standards.⁠[18]

In February 2026, Russian security agencies separately opened a criminal investigation into Durov on suspicion of “aiding terrorism”; Durov denied it and called the move a pretext for restricting Telegram and suppressing privacy and expression. This case and the French proceedings involve different jurisdictions and different allegations.⁠[19]

The opening of an investigation neither amounts to a conviction nor is refuted simply because the person concerned calls it politically motivated.⁠[19]

Telegram’s current press materials say Durov lives in Dubai and holds dual citizenship of the United Arab Emirates and France; these are the company’s public statements as of the page’s last update.⁠[4]

@durov is his public Telegram channel and can serve as a source for his own statements, but it is not an independent personal website.⁠[4]

The open-source community subsequently carried on the code and rebranded the project as The Open Network. Pavel later publicly supported the integration of TON with Telegram; this cooperation does not erase the 2020 legal withdrawal, nor does it mean that Telegram owned the network throughout the community phase.⁠[11]