- Telegram has just announced Its first annual profit, which achieved $ 540 million in 2024. Revenue also achieved $ 1.4 billion, an increase of $ 343 million a year ago. The company is fully owned by Pavel Dorouov, 40 -year -old billionaire, which was often called Mark Zuckerberg from Russia, who also faces criminal charges at the present time.
Pavel Dorov, the man behind TELGRAM Correspondent Service, is one of the most interesting figures in the world of technology. While compared to Mark Zuckerberg, given his tendency to launch successful social media companies, he also shares the richest man in the world-and Freedom Freedom Fellow– Illon musk.
Dorouov, like Musk, is a supporter of the plaza, which means he is a strong supporter to have more children to fill the planet. Although Durov says he “never married and preferred to live alone,” he also announced last July that he was “more than 100 biological children.” In a telegram postSince a friend, the CEO of the billionaire has claimed that he and his wife can have a child, “He has now helped more than a hundred husbands in 12 countries to have children”, and “at least one clinic for IVF has available for frozen sperm for unknown use by families who want to have children.”
Dorov is an interesting and polarization character, who had a fair share of drilling and peaks in just 40 years of life.
Miracle of mathematics and coding
Pavel Dorov was born in October 1984 in the second largest city in Russia, Saint Petersburg-although it was Leningrad at the time, before the Soviet Union was officially dissolved in 1991.
While Dorov Serve in the Soviet Red Army During World War II, and has The father was a researcher And the head of the teaching staff at St. Petersburg State University, Durov actually spent many years in Turin, Italy, after moving to the Mediterranean country at the age of four.
Dorov, like his older brother Nikolai, was a miracle in mathematics. In one of the rare interviews, 2024 sitting with Taker KarlsonDorov said he won and Nicolay won multiple gold medals at the International Mathematics Olympics and was shown on Italian TV several times to solve cubic equations in the actual time.
When his family returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, they brought a gift of separation from Italy: IBM personal computer. Durov Karlson told it that it was in “one of the few families in Russia that ourselves can actually teach us how to program.”
Mark Zuckerberg from Russia
Dorov was the amazing programmer. Bani a Popular Forum For his university – Petersburg State, the same school where his father worked – while he was a student there. But in 2006, one of his colleagues presented him to Facebook, which prompted the husband to create a social network of their own. (He became a colleague in the third chapter, the third co -founder.)
They were created, VKontakte (also known as VK), which was launched in September of that year, and collected one million users after only eight months. Less than a year later, the user base swollen to 10 million. By December 2008, Dorov was the proud operator of the most popular social network in Russia.
Dorov was occupied as VK CEO until April 21, 2014. He insisted that it was only intended as a joke– The company removed it as the CEO of VK.
“It is interesting that the shareholders did not have the courage to do this directly and learned about the vague dismissal of the press,” Dorov wrote on VK On the day he shot.
Dorov, who had a controversial relationship with the Russian authorities, said after rejecting many requests to remove the pages of opposition politicians from VK, while the overthrow of it means that the company had been assumed by Vladimir Putin’s allies. After only five days, on April 26, Dorov left Russia He said, “He has no plans to return” because “the country does not comply with the Internet at the present time.”
Create a telegram
During his time as VK CEO, Dorov was Many running with the government. So in 2013, when he was still leading efforts on the social network, he and his brother Nikolai decided to launch a correspondent service based on a comprehensive encryption, to maintain special messages from government intervention. In August of that year, the brothers Telegram Messenger launched that year, first with iPhone, and then for Android devices.
(After a year, Mark Zuckerberg directed Facebook to buy WhatsApp in a $ 19 billion deal. Durov He said TechcrunchPotcher Mike At that time, “The number of messaging applications there does not matter there if all of them absorb.”
After Dorov left Russia after being expelled from VK, New York Times I mentioned Dorov was “moving from one country to another every few weeks with a small group of computer programmers. One day he is in Paris, and another in Singapore.” In the end, Dorov set up a store with his team in Berlin, Germany, in 2014 before moving its headquarters to Dubai in 2017. The company says this Her servers are spread Throughout the world, “there is no single government or a block of similar countries in thinking that can intrude on the privacy of the user and freedom of expression,” according to a company spokesman, who also added that Telegram “will perform a legal analysis of the request and may reveal the individual’s IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities” if the user is suspected in a criminal state that would violate the application conditions.
Telegram now owns a billion users and has become profitable for the first time last year. according to Financial timesAfter announcing a $ 173 million loss in 2023, compared to only $ 343 million of revenues, the company recorded a profit of $ 540 million in 2024 for $ 1.4 billion revenues. Telegram, which has released about $ 2.4 billion of bonds over the past four years (and returned it to 375 million dollars between September and December last year), the company also continued “AI to conversation”, partnership with Elon Musk XAI to integrate Shatib, GROK, into the social network.
Legal problem
In August 2024, The French authorities were detained After his own plane landed outside Paris, he claimed that he had been allowed and allowed illegal activity-such as drug trafficking, fraud and sexual use of children-from the flow through the telegram. While he was forced to stay in the country at the time, he was finally allowed to leave France in March this year, albeit temporarily, To visit Dubai.
Dorov faces prison for up to 10 years, if convicted. His criminal case reactivated the debate about the extent in which technology executives should be responsible for the activities that occur on their platforms. Binance Changpeng Zhao pledges in 2024 the money laundering violations that occurred on the encryption platform, and was Ross Ulbricht, the Creator of Market Silk Road, I owe the use of the Internet to facilitate a criminal institution. But while Ulbricht was sentenced to a double prison in prison, in addition to 40 years, without the possibility of conditional release, he was released from prison after spending 12 years in prison, in January 2025, after receiving Full and unconditional amnesty By President Trump.
This story was originally shown on Fortune.com
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