Pavel Durov’s Net Worth: Telegram CEO’s fortune explored amid his reported arrest in France

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was reportedly arrested at the Bourget airport on August 24. According to a Reuters report published on August 25, the CEO was traveling aboard his jet when he was stopped with an arrest warrant for a preliminary police investigation around 8 PM local time.

Reportedly, the investigation was because of a lack of moderators on the messaging app, which allowed criminal activity to burgeon. The news is now across almost all media platforms.

Several X users have also posted updates regarding this. American commentator Jackson Hinkle wrote that Pavel Durov will now face 20 years of prison time, although the same has not yet been officially confirmed.

Concerning his recent arrest, it is now reported that charges of terrorism and money laundering have also been laid against him.

According to Forbes, the Telegram CEO has a real-time net worth of $15.5 billion as of August 25. He is listed at 122 among the billionaires of 2024. Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov founded the app in 2013. While Pavel oversees financial and ideological support, Nikolai looks after technology.

---

A glimpse into Pavel Durov's fortune over the years

The Forbes magazine calls Pavel Durov Russia’s Zuckerberg as he founded VKontakte on October 1, 2006, at the age of 22. In addition to his brother, Pavel also had the support of his friends Lev Leviev and Vyacheslav Mirilashvili in creating VKontakte, which is popular as the country’s largest social network.

In the first year of operations, the website received its first direct investment from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which covered 25% of the shares. In 2009, the company's valuation reportedly stood at nearly $234 million.

Telegram was largely funded by the founder himself and was launched with the primary objective of creating a secure messaging app with end-to-end encryption. However, before its launch, Pavel and his brother developed MTProto, a strongly secured encryption protocol that came with end-to-end encryption.

MTProto was the core encryption protocol for the Telegram app. The social media messaging app reportedly gained approximately $2.7 billion through two rounds of pre-IPO venture capital and debt financing.

Pavel Durov's fortune has steadily risen over the years, although it dropped between 2021 and 2023. According to Forbes, his net worth was $1.7 billion in 2018, $2.7 billion in 2019, $3.4 billion in 2020, $17.2 billion in 2021, $15.1 billion in 2022, $11.5 billion in 2023, and $15.5 billion in 2024.

---

Pavel Durov got "too much attention" in the US

Forbes reports that the CEO left Russia in 2014 because he did not cooperate with the Russian secret service to provide encrypted data. He has been a French citizen since August 2021.

In an interview with writer and commentator Tucker Carlson in April 2024, Pavel Durov said that every time he entered the US, FBI agents would greet him at the airport. Durov added,

“We get too much attention from the FBI and other security agencies whenever we come to the US. They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the Telegram app on the client side."

He continued,

"And they were trying to persuade him (Telegram's engineer) to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into Telegram's code that, in my understanding, would serve as backdoors.”

According to a Business Today report, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy uses the app as a preferred means of communication. Telegram has over 950 million active users and plans to achieve one billion users by next year.