Pavel Durov appears to have brutally trolled Tucker Carlson. But the American journalist was not ready for this.
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The founder and sole owner of Telegram Pavel Durov gave the first big interviews from 2017. The interlocutor was American journalist Tucker Carlson, whose name thundered across all Russian news feeds in connection with another conversation, aimed primarily at Western viewers. Apparently, by choosing the interviewer, Durov decided to emphasize that his target audience is also the “collective West.” In any case, for the Russian-speaking public, the most interesting moment was the two chairs naturally looming behind the protagonist’s back: one with chiseled peaks, and the second – literally with those same, twisted ones.
Durov forced Carlson to look at this materialization of the Russian criminal riddle point-blank throughout the entire interview. But Carlson didn’t understand the hint. As a result, we have what we have: an hour-long advertising video for Telegram and Pavel Durov personally, aimed at the very heart of ordinary Americans who are still “tweeting.”
What could Tucker Carlson ask Pavel Durov? “Bingo” suggests the following:
- comrade major
- anonymous channels and de-anonymization of their admins
- amount of capital
- was the social network “VKontakte” copied from “Facebook”* (banned in Russia, owned by Meta**, a company recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation. – Ed.)
- emoticon in the form of an eggplant “with special effects”.
In short, read it and cross it out. This will be faster than watching a video published on Youtube, obviously with the sole purpose of attracting new users to Telegram from there.
Pavel Durov was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union. When he was 4 years old, the family moved to Italy, where Pavel was able to compare the imperfect Soviet system and the capitalist system. And even then he realized that capitalism and a market economy suited him better.
Pavel studied at an Italian school, his brother was a mathematical genius who was shown on Italian television at the age of ten. But then the Soviet Union collapsed. And the family decided to return to Russia for the only reason: their father was offered to head one of the departments at St. Petersburg State University (Valery Durov in 1992–2013 headed the department of classical philology of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University. – Ed.).
Pavel did not specify that he studied at the same philological department where his dad held a high position. But he said that he was “taught everything”: six foreign languages at the same time, mathematics at the level of specialized schools, chemistry and biology.
From Italy the family brought an IBM personal computer, which “only a few” owned in those years. Pavel started learning programming on it.
Durov founded the VK company (the name “VKontakte” is not mentioned even once throughout the entire interview) when he was 21 years old. And he doesn’t like it when they call it “Russian Facebook” because “many things were done there earlier than on Facebook”.
For a long time, Durov was the only employee of his company: he wrote the code, developed the design and managed the servers. He even responded to support requests himself.
And then his company grew to 100 million active users.
The first problems in Russia began in 2011–2012. This was due to the fact that the Russian opposition began to use VK to organize mass protests, when “half a million people gathered in the main square of the city.” The government demanded that Durov block opposition communities, but Durov refused. Not because I wanted to take sides, but to protect freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
In 2013, the company had similar problems, but this time due to protests in Ukraine, where people again used VK to “go out to the main square of the city.”
By the end of 2013, Durov was faced with a tough choice and eventually sold his stake in the company, resigned as its CEO and left the country.
And those who say that Telegram is “part of the Russian government” simply do not know where Telegram came from. And these rumors are also an attempt to discredit Telegram from less successful competitors.
Competitors spend millions of dollars on marketing. And Durov spends zero dollars on marketing. Telegram has grown to 900 million active users on its own, without advertising or promotion.
Durov never sought to become rich, he sought to become free. And he sees his mission as using his social networks to help other people “express their freedom.”
Durov experienced a “very stressful situation” when “armed police came to his house and tried to break in” precisely because he refused to block opposition groups in VK. And then Durov came up with the idea of creating an application protected by encryption for secure communication. Pavel Durov’s brilliant brother created open code, an encryption standard that they still use today.
After leaving Russia, the Durov brothers tried to found a new company in Berlin, then in London, Singapore and San Francisco. But they didn’t stay anywhere because of bureaucratic problems with the employment of programmers, whom Durov wanted to gather from different parts of the world.
Pavel Durov expected that San Francisco would become the home of his new company. But two things happened. Firstly, Pavel was attacked on the street. He was returning to the hotel around eight in the evening after a meeting with Jack Dorsey. Three hefty guys tried to snatch Durov’s phone, in which he was just writing a tweet about how he met with the founder of Twitter. Durov didn’t want to give up the phone, entered the fight, won with little blood, and then ran away.
The second thing that made Durov doubt that he should stay in the United States was the increased attention from the FBI. And the government cybersecurity agency also tried to secretly lure away a high-class engineer from Durov, whom he brought with him to the United States. The agency convinced the engineer to integrate a certain code into Telegram, which would become a “back door” for hacking the messenger. The engineer did not give in and told Pavel everything. But wherever Durov went in the United States, two FBI agents greeted him at the airport with questions, and once they even showed up at nine in the morning at the house he rented, right during breakfast.
After the events of January 6, 2021, one of the US congressmen from the Democratic Party appealed to the leadership of Telegram with a demand to transfer to him all information regarding the “insurrection” (a crowd of supporters of presidential candidate Donald Trump, dissatisfied with the election results, seized the Capitol building), and data protesters. The congressman stressed that if the information is not transferred, it would be a “violation of the US Constitution.” Durov showed the congressman’s letter to his lawyers, and they advised him to ignore this message. Two weeks later, a similar letter arrived, but from Republican congressmen. They, on the contrary, demanded that no information about the protesters be transferred to previous petitioners, because such transfer would be a violation of the US Constitution. Durov found this funny: it turns out that no matter what he did, he would have violated the US Constitution.
So Durov treated both requests from American congressmen as he did with most requests received by the Telegram administration: he ignored them.
But the most unpleasant pressure on Telegram comes not from governments, but from Apple and Google. These platforms censor everything you read or watch on your smartphone. And they threaten to remove Telegram from their app stores if they do not comply. This is not a small thing. Platforms force any app to obey their rules and remove content they deem contrary to their values. The rules are quite general: a ban on violence, discrimination or abuse of children, but Durov raises questions about the application of these rules. Sometimes we manage to reach an agreement. Sometimes not.
At the same time, Durov claims that Telegram is a neutral messenger that respects the privacy of its users.
Seven years ago, Pavel Durov moved to Dubai. Dubai turned out to be the best place for a new company. It is easy to do business there and hire foreigners, there is a pleasant tax system and developed infrastructure. But the main thing is that “this is a small neutral country that wants to be friends with everyone.” And during all this time, the UAE government never asked Durov for a “back door”, or to block anyone, or for personal data of users.
Telegram is 100% owned solely by Pavel Durov. No shareholders or investors – everything to maintain independence. There was no question of money for Durov, because already 10 years ago he had “several hundred million dollars in bank accounts or in bitcoins.” And he “does nothing” with this money. Durov does not own real estate, land, planes or yachts – any large assets. Because all this “ties you to a physical location,” forces you to “choose between leather chairs or velvet chairs,” and Durov’s goal is freedom.
Nevertheless, Durov admitted that three years ago Telegram issued bonds because its debts had grown and external injections were required. And before that there was a cryptocurrency project, which also helped to attract some funds (obviously, this refers to Toncoin based on the TON blockchain; Tucker Carlson did not ask anything about the purpose of the crypto game in Notcoin, probably because he had not even heard of it. – Approx. ed.). But Durov did not transfer his share of ownership in the company or voting rights to anyone.
Durov remains the only product manager of Telegram and personally works on every new feature, with every developer and designer. There are no HR people in Telegram. To select the best specialists, Durov holds competitions for developers on a separate platform every month or two. Those who pass the multi-level selection process will probably join the Telegram team, which has no more than 30 engineers.
Why don’t others do business like Durov? He asked this question to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Durov told him that 20 people were enough for his company to operate. To which he replied: “I know. But if we now start laying off a huge number of employees, this will cause panic on Wall Street, they will decide that something is wrong with the company. But we wouldn’t want that.”
To maintain the freedom and independence of Telegram, Pavel Durov and his employees are careful, inaccessible and “do not travel to strange places.” They don’t go to China or Russia. For the same reason, Durov tries not to travel to the USA.
Durov “does not interact” with the US National Security Agency, which, in particular, “read the texts” of Tucker Carlson. Perhaps in the newspapers Pavel might read something like the Pegasus spyware program was allegedly installed on his phone.
Durov, by default, believes that all the devices he uses are hacked. After what he encountered in the USA, Pavel Durov does not trust platforms developed in this country from a security point of view.
People encountered the first serious restrictions on the right to express their opinions during the coronavirus pandemic, when governments directly prohibited criticism of the lockdown, mask regime or vaccines. Then Telegram, according to Durov, was able to maintain neutrality, giving government agencies the opportunity to express their position, but also without limiting those who criticized it.
Why is Durov not famous and not considered a hero in the USA? “I’m not an expert in American politics,” the Telegram founder replies. And he notes favorably that Twitter, now called X, is moving towards free speech.
* Banned in the Russian Federation; owned by Meta** Corporation.
** Recognized as extremist and banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Venera Galeeva watched and played bingo,
“Fontanka.ru”
