This is no ordinary Joe. In fact, he’s not even an ordinary billionaire (if there is such a thing). Consider his first 40 years:

• Born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1984, his family moved to Turin, Italy, when he was just four years old, returning to Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
• He and his older brother Nikolai were math prodigies, winning multiple gold medals at the International Math Olympiad. Having brought back from Italy an IBM personal computer, they were able to teach themselves how to program — a rare opportunity in those days.
• Together with a classmate at St. Petersburg State University, he created the Russian social network VKontakte (VK) in 2006, which amassed a million users in the first eight months.
• When in 2014 the Russian government insisted that he remove opposition politicians’ pages from VK, he refused and left Russia, saying he had “no plans to go back [because] the country is incompatible with internet business at the moment.”
• In 2013, the Durov brothers also launched Telegram Messenger, an end-to-end encrypted messaging service that now has a billion users and reported $1.4 billion in revenue ($540 million in profit) in 2024, after showing a multi-million-dollar loss the previous year.

• Since leaving Russia, he has obtained citizenship status in France, the United Arab Emirates, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. He travels the world the way most of us schlep around town . . . only first class.
• In August 2024, he was detained by French authorities for allegedly allowing illegal activity (including drug trafficking, fraud, and child sex-abuse materials) to be conducted on Telegram. He says he is merely protecting the privacy of his clients. He is currently under investigation, and if convicted, may face up to ten years in prison. Pending a resolution of the charges, he isn’t allowed to travel at all.
• On the personal side, he is unmarried, but claims to be the biological father of 100 children. Like Elon Musk, he is a pronatalist who believes the world’s population needs to be increased, preferably by superior human beings such as themselves. But unlike Musk, who prefers to hire women to bear his dozen or more children, Durov shares his largesse via sperm banks. What a stud!

But extreme wealth and a talent for procreation are not the only things he has in common with Musk. His company has been working on “conversational AI,” and has partnered with Musk’s company — xAI — to integrate its chatbot, known as Grok, into Telegram.

I guess what they say is true: that the first billion dollars are the hardest to come by; after that, the next few billion are easy.

I wouldn’t know.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
5/24/25

NOTE: Biographical details are from an article by Dave Smith, Finance.yahoo.com, May 22, 2025. Opinions and snarky comments are my own.