Pavel Durov, the billionaire cofounder of messaging app Telegram, says he has fathered more than 100 kids — and plans to leave them his estimated $17 billion fortune.
In an interview with French magazine Le Point published on Thursday, June 19, the Russian entrepreneur, 40, said that he has six “official” children but has fathered dozens more through sperm donation.
“Six of whom I am the official father, whom I had with three different partners,” Durov explained. “The others come from my anonymous donation. The clinic, where I started donating sperm fifteen years ago to help a friend, told me that more than 100 babies had been conceived this way in 12 countries.”
Durov has an estimated net worth of $17.1 billion, according to Forbes, and he plans to divide his fortune among all of his children. However, they will have to wait until they are older to access their inheritance.
“I decided that my children would not have access to my fortune until a period of thirty years has elapsed, starting from today,” Durov said. “I want them to live like normal people, to build themselves up alone, to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account.”
“I want to specify that I make no difference between my children: there are those who were conceived naturally and those who come from my sperm donations. They are all my children and will all have the same rights! I don’t want them to tear each other apart after my death,” he added.
Durov opened up about his sizable progeny in a Telegram post in July 2024, writing, “I was just told that I have over 100 biological kids. How is this possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone?”
The billionaire said that a friend approached him to ask for a sperm donation several years before because “he and his wife couldn’t have kids due to a fertility issue.”
Durov said he agreed and that “the boss of the clinic told me that ‘high quality donor material’ was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples.”
“Fast forward to 2024, my past donating activity has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids,” he said.
Durov shared at the time that he plans to “open-source” his DNA “so that my biological children can find each other more easily,” adding that he had no regrets about being a donor.
Durov cofounded Telegram with his older brother, Nikolai Durov, in 2013. In August 2024, Durov was arrested and indicted in France on charges including complicity in the distribution of child pornography and drug trafficking in connection with Telegram, which has 1 billion active monthly users. He has denied all of the charges against him.
“It’s totally absurd. Just because criminals use our messaging service among many others doesn’t make those who run it criminals,” he told Le Point on Thursday. “Nothing has ever been proven showing that I am, even for a second, guilty of anything.”
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