Billionaire man in black who taunts Putin
TELEGRAM’S billionaire founder Pavel Durov once threw paper aeroplanes made from 5,000rouble (£50) banknotes out of his office window in St Petersburg.
He could afford it. Known for his all-black clothes, Durov, 36, has an estimated fortune of
£12.5 billion. The unmarried father-of-two is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after creating VKontakte (VK) the country’s largest internet social network.
In 2015, he sold a 12 per cent stake for an estimated £218million. The sale came a year after he faced pressure from the Kremlin to release personal information of protest leaders in Ukraine who used VK to arrange meetings and plot strategy. VK’s offices were raided by police.
By then, however, Durov had fled and he established a new company in New York. His secret project was Telegram, reportedly a direct response to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attempt to interfere with VK.
Three years ago, Durov refused to give Russian security services access to users’ messages on Telegram, which had become a favourite of anti-Putin groups.
The Kremlin threatened to wipe Durov ‘off the country’s digital map’ but he remained defiant and Russia abandoned its efforts to block the app, which has 30million users there and more than half a billion worldwide. About 1.5million subscribers are signing up every day.
The company’s HQ is now in London and Durov, a vegetarian and teetotaller, has continued to taunt Putin, posing on Instagram beside a pool in Bali with the hashtag #PutinShirtlessChallenge.