One of the biggest messaging platforms in the world, with more than a billion users, Telegram is marketed as a safe haven for communication, as well as a one-stop shop for broadcasting, file sharing, shopping, gaming and more. But its claims to be ideologically and technologically unassailable from the prying eyes of authorities, combined with a hands-off approach to moderation, have made it the default channel for anyone operating at the margins of legality, according to critics. It’s where you might find gruesome videos of explosions and beheadings alongside semi-official communications from militaries and intelligence agencies.
Telegram, Pavel Durov and the shaky future for tech’s libertarian princelings
The messaging app’s founder has become a poster boy for the backlash in Europe over CEO accountability — and a target for Russia
Published
One of the biggest messaging platforms in the world, with more than a
billion users, Telegram is marketed as a safe haven for communication,
as well as a one-stop shop for broadcasting, file sharing, shopping,
gaming and more. But its claims to be ideologically and technologically
unassailable from the prying eyes of authorities, combined with a
hands-off approach to moderation, have made it the default channel for
anyone operating at the margins of legality, according to critics. It’s
where you might find gruesome videos of explosions and beheadings
alongside semi-official communications from militaries and intelligence
agencies.
Last
summer, Nasdaq-listed Verb Technologies, a marketing video software
group, agreed to a $558mn investment from a vehicle run by Manuel Stotz,
then president of the Ton Foundation. In return, Verb switched to
become a digital assets treasury company holding Toncoin. Verb, since
renamed Ton Strategy Co, has invested more than $700mn in the
cryptocurrency. Announcing the deal, Stotz, who is now Ton Strategy’s
executive chairman, described Durov as the “GOAT (“Greatest of All
Time”) — in the domain of social media & product”, and posted a
topless photo of the founder: “His proof-of-work [is], well, quite
visible😁”
Telegram
told the FT that its “long-term business model is not dependent on
cryptocurrencies”, adding that its “main focus” is selling premium
subscriptions, as well as advertising. The company called Campo’s
analysis: “uneducated, unreliable and just plain wrong”.
Some
bondholders remain bullish about Telegram’s business prospects. One
told the FT that the platform had opportunities for swift revenue growth
given it was highly undermonetised. Another added, “What makes these
guys different is they are better in connecting the whole ecosystem to
the messaging platform, and they seem more capable than other platforms
in finding ways to monetise the ecosystem.”
Campo
was not convinced: “Strip out the Ton sales and crypto deals and you
have roughly $350mn in real product revenue” in the first half of 2025,
he said. “It’s a house of cards . . . Pavel has navigated impossible
situations before. The margin for error is just extremely thin.”
It was mid-May 2025, at the Cannes Film Festival,
and Durov was attending a charity auction in the resplendent Hotel du
Cap-Eden-Roc with his girlfriend, the glamorous crypto influencer and
aspiring actress Yulia Vavilova. As the auctioneer reeled off the lots,
Durov casually bid $400,000 to buy her a role in an upcoming Spike Lee
movie. The auctioneer slammed down a gavel and the ballroom erupted into
cheers of delight. Durov did not so much as flinch.
It
was more than an extravagant romantic gesture. The theatrics served as a
reminder to anyone watching — French authorities included — that nine
months after his detainment Durov would not be cowed. Since the previous
summer, he had been living in luxury lockdown in one of Paris’s palace
hotels. Vavilova had posted pictures of five-star spas and horse riding
near the palace of Versailles. That year “felt like a survival race
straight out of Squid Game,” she
wrote on Telegram, “while other moments were more like an enchanting
Emily in Paris story.” The travel ban was relaxed in July 2025.
A
Telegram bondholder put it differently. “He’s so rich that he feels he
owns the world. In some ways, it’s true . . . Poor Pavel, he’s forced to
live in some Parisian palace. I’m sure he’s enjoying it and living like
Putin does in Russia.”
Durov
has appeared “increasingly paranoid” since his detainment and “seems to
mostly be talking to a very narrow circle of people”, said Aleksandra
Urman, a researcher at the University of Zurich who has studied
extremism on Telegram. She noted he had also strategically embraced
American libertarians, granting video interviews to conservative
commentator Tucker Carlson, and meeting in Paris with podcaster Lex
Fridman. “He’s trying to pivot to a certain part of his western
audience. In the west, he knows his main user groups have been
extreme-right or right-wing groups. It lands well.” Telegram disputed
this characterisation, adding that its users “don’t belong to a certain
political party, what unites them is a belief in free speech”.
Durov
is also close to Xavier Niel, the maverick French tech and telecoms
billionaire who was among the first people Durov called after his
detainment, according to people familiar with the matter. Niel has taken
regular walks with Durov around Paris and advised him on how to
navigate the French legal system. Niel, who spent a short stint in
prison early in his career related to his early investments in sex shops
in France, told the FT in November 2024: “When I went to prison,
everyone disappeared on me. So when a friend runs into a problem in
France, I’m not the kind of person who doesn’t pick up the phone.”
Durov
has also courted Elon Musk, who associates say he long admired. In
December 2024, Durov met Musk for lunch when the X boss was visiting
Paris for the reopening of the Notre-Dame cathedral. Shortly after a
second meeting in May, Durov announced a one-year deal with xAI to
integrate the start-up’s controversial Grok chatbot into Telegram.
Telegram was to receive $300mn from xAI, as well as half the revenue
from xAI subscriptions sold via the messaging app, he wrote on X.
That
partnership has not materialised. Instead, Telegram recently launched
Cocoon, a “decentralised AI network” designed by Nikolai and others,
whereby individual owners of the expensive GPU chips that power AI
models rent them out to developers in return for Toncoin.
There
have also been PR crises. In July 2024, a woman named Irina Bolgar told
Forbes Russia that Durov was father to her three children, providing
proof of his paternity. Days later, Durov posted on social media about
his widespread sperm donation projects,
saying it was possible he had “over 100 biological kids” and he planned
to “open source” his DNA so that his children could find one another.
In August that year, it emerged that Bolgar had filed a criminal lawsuit
against Durov in a Swiss court in 2023 alleging he had been violent
towards one of their children and had stopped supporting the family
financially, according to court documents. Telegram rejected the
allegations: “These events, which never occurred, were only ‘remembered’
by Ms Bolgar . . . as she was preparing to initiate legal proceedings
for personal financial gain. The suspicious timing raises doubts about
the credibility of these accusations.”
One
of Durov’s preoccupations, as he has gone after western investment and
audiences, has been distancing himself from his native country. In the
past, Durov has refused to take sides on the Russia-Ukraine war or
comment on Vladimir Putin: “Let’s not go there,” he told the FT in 2024.
But he continues to deny any ties to Moscow. “A sad spectacle of a
state afraid of its own people,” he said on Tuesday after the news of
the Russian criminal investigation broke.
In
the wake of the French investigation, conjecture about these ties has
grown in the west. Upon his detainment in Paris, Moscow raced to offer
Durov assistance, demanding consular access to him and suggesting the
case was politically motivated. Independent Russian news website
iStories reported it had obtained records of Durov having travelled in
and out of Russia more than 50 times between 2014 and 2021.
Other
critics noted that immediately before his detainment, Durov had been
travelling around Central Asia with Vavilova, staying at the Four
Seasons in Baku, Azerbaijan, where they drove racing cars, took
helicopter rides and sharpened their marksmanship at shooting ranges.
The trip appears to have overlapped with Putin’s state visit to Baku on
August 18 and 19. The Kremlin has publicly denied there was any meeting
between the pair.
Even
so, said one European official, if Durov had “problems with
Russia . . . I struggle with the messaging. Durov was in Baku, that’s
practically Putin’s backyard”. Telegram said that Durov made infrequent
trips to St Petersburg to visit family, which he posted about publicly
on his Instagram account, noting he has not returned since the start of
the war in Ukraine. The company rejected the idea of any meeting between
Durov and Putin in Baku. It said: “Mr Durov was in a city of 2.4
million people outside of Russia, not at a backyard barbecue across from
the Kremlin.”
Evaluations differ on the strength of the
investigation against Durov. His allies believe the case against him is
weak, the result of a net cast as wide as possible by French
prosecutors who, they claim, lack expertise in digital platforms. “I
have never seen so many accusations with so little legal precision,” one
of Durov’s lawyers, Christophe Ingrain, told French magazine Le Point.
The
prosecutors leading the investigation say they acted after receiving
complaints about Telegram’s lack of responsiveness to requests from law
enforcement in France and other European countries. Johanna Brousse, the
magistrate who leads the cyber crimes division at the Paris
prosecutor’s office, is a particularly formidable opponent. Her peers
describe her as a determined campaigner unafraid to push boundaries to
prosecute across borders and at the cutting edge of technology. “She’s
like Joan of Arc . . . she’s impassioned about her work with a strong
sense of the collective,” one said.
Durov’s
patience with the French justice system seems to have worn thin. Last
year, he accused top French intelligence officials of pressuring him to
censor certain conservative Moldovan and Romanian accounts on Telegram
ahead of fraught elections in each country. “I refused. We didn’t block
protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in
Europe,” he wrote on X.
In
a rare public statement France’s intelligence agency DGSE said it
“strongly refutes allegations that requests to ban accounts linked to
any electoral process were made”. Instead, it had “been obliged, on
several occasions” to contact Durov “to remind him firmly of his
company’s responsibilities, and his own personal responsibilities, in
terms of preventing terrorist and child pornography threats”.
In
the coming weeks, Telegram is due to repay the principal on some of its
bonds. Whether investors will be as forthcoming in the future as they
have been in the past remains to be seen. For its part, Telegram insists
on its independence in the near term. “Following next month’s bond
payment, we will remain highly liquid, with cash on hand that materially
exceeds our outstanding bond obligations,” it said. “Our balance sheet
is strong, we are generating substantial cash flow, and we have neither
the need nor the intention to seek external financing.”
One
person familiar with Durov’s thinking claims the drawn out
investigation has begun to weigh on him. “He feels all this is very
unfair and misguided,” they said. Publicly, though, Durov has remained
steadfast. “Up until this day we don’t understand what we did
wrong . . . the investigation is ongoing and it’s been frustratingly
slow,” he said, via video link to the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2025.
His appearance was introduced by a projected image of Durov dressed as a
Greek deity, oiled chest barely covered by a white toga, with a goat
slung over his shoulder.
Asked
by the interviewer if he considered himself a hostage in France, or if
French intelligence were trying to pressure him to “do what they want”,
Durov was solemn. “I seem to be held to higher standards than most other
platforms,” he replied. “I would rather die than become anyone’s
asset”.
Additional
reporting by Leila Abboud in Paris, Antoine Gara in New York and Rob
Smith, Philip Stafford and Ivan Levingston in London
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