Pável Dúrov, the visionary from whom the Kremlin snatched his 'Facebook' and counterattacked with a bigger hit: Telegram

Raising one of the main communication channels in the world in one of the most repressive countries on the planet, Russia, has a lot of merit. Doing it a second time when the Kremlin took away his first company is an anomaly. Entrepreneur Pável Dúrov (St. Petersburg, 39 years old) founded the Russian alternative to Facebook, vKontakte (VK), in 2006, and eight years later he was forced to sell his shares for 300 million euros under harassment from the security services of Vladimir Putin. Instead of retiring at the age of 29, he created the Telegram messaging service.

This platform, recognized for its system to hide the information that circulates through its private chats and news groups and which is constantly accompanied by controversy - the judge of the National Court, Santiago Pedraz, initially attended the meeting this week. petition by several media outlets to block the application from distributing content protected by copyright, although it was finally backed down—has more than 900 million users. And Dúrov, exiled in Dubai, has big plans for the company and refuses to sell it despite having received offers with dizzying figures.

A week ago, Dúrov gave his first interview to the media since 2017. The businessman announced in the British newspaper Financial Times that he is considering taking Telegram public in the future and claimed to have rejected investment fund offers of $30 billion—more than 27,000 million euros at the exchange rate—for his company. “We want to remain independent,” said the businessman before launching this week a bond issue of $330 million maturing in 2026, the year in which he plans to launch Telegram on the market.

If the offer for Telegram is real, its value would multiply almost two dozen times the nearly 1.5 billion euros that VK is worth in the Russian market, a company that today is directed by the son of the man who is considered

President Putin's

shadow cardinal.

, Sergei Kiriyenko. Vladimir Kiriyenko, who is barely a year older than Durov, was from a very young age vice president of another technology giant, Rostelecom, sheltered from his father's ties to the Kremlin. His father, deputy head of the presidential cabinet, leaked the candidates who “competed” with Putin in the farce of his presidential elections this year.

Durov graduated in Philology from the Saint Petersburg State University in the 2000s. A brilliant student, he designed several web pages for students to exchange notes at the same time that Facebook was born, which encouraged him to create VK in 2006 with his brother Nikolai and his friend and classmate Ilia Perekopski, today second at Telegram.

The twenty-year-old Pável Dúrov was the protagonist of a few controversies while his social network gained hundreds of millions of users in the post-Soviet space. Among others, in 2012 he caused a fight at the entrance to his headquarters by throwing bills of more than one hundred euros from his office, and in 2013 he was involved in an accident that went unpunished.

It was not his eccentricities that cost Russia's most promising young man his first empire. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) demanded that he hand over all information on the private accounts of several political opponents in 2011. Durov refused, as he did two years later, in December 2013, when the former KGB asked him for the data of Ukrainian users who participated in the Maidan protests, which would end up leading two months later in a bloodbath of protesters and the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Durov, closely investigated by Putin's spy services, left Russia in April 2014 and sold his stake in VK for $300 million to a business group close to the Kremlin, Mail.ru. “It is impossible to manage an Internet business in this country,” cried the entrepreneur.

The founder of VK had launched Telegram a year earlier, a platform that has multiplied its user base from 500 to 900 million since 2022 thanks to several factors. The main one is to combine the messaging service with other personal contacts, such as WhatsApp, with a channel system that also serves as a source of information in a simple and fast way. Its good interface and the company's zero interference in the content that its users follow has done the rest. Its popularity has skyrocketed since the war unleashed on Ukraine, unlike the course taken by

Telegram never had it easy in its homeland. The Russian agency for Internet control, Roskomnadzor, demanded from Durov the keys to access its users' chats in 2017 under the pretext of preventing terrorist attacks. The entrepreneur rejected the Kremlin's demands for the third time, and Moscow passed a law requiring technology companies to store all data on servers in Russian territory. Telegram refused, and Putin's justice ordered it to be blocked in 2018.

That measure never worked. Roskomnadzor's attempts to prevent its operation failed. However, Durov and the Russian prosecutor's office surprisingly announced in the summer of 2020 that they had reached an agreement whereby Telegram could operate normally in Russia again if it handed over information on suspected terrorists to security forces. If this concession is limited to them, doubts still persist: the Kremlin considers “extremist organizations” from the LGTBI movement to the team of dissident Alexei Navalni, and several ultranationalist channels critical of the defeats of the war have been persecuted by the police.

In any case, Telegram is aiming higher than ever. Dúrov announced at the end of February that it will open its platform in 100 more countries and will allow advertising to be monetized there, even with cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, as he confessed in his interview in the Financial Times, the company already has a turnover of “hundreds of millions of dollars” and expects to generate profits this or next year. All this with barely fifty full-time employees.

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