Telegram billionaire and his journey to becoming a father of more than 100 children

In the summer of 2024, many young, educated women came to the AltraVita fertility clinic in the south of Moscow, Russia. They were lured by an unprecedented marketing campaign: free sperm.

The owner of this sperm is Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire who founded the Telegram application.

At conferences and across social media platforms, AltraVita advertises Durov as having “high genetic compatibility.” They added that the Russian billionaire is willing to pay the entire cost of in vitro fertilization (IVF) for women under 37 years old who want to use their sperm.

“The women who come here are all wonderful. They are educated and in good health,” said a doctor who used to work at the clinic. Program participants are required to be single to avoid legal problems.

Durov, a 41-year-old billionaire currently living in Dubai, publicly announced on social networks that he has had at least 100 children in 12 countries because of sperm donation, not to mention the 6 children he has with three women.

In an online post in July 2024, Durov said he started donating sperm around 2010. First, he wanted to help a friend who wanted to have a child and then continued to donate anonymously to contribute to solving the “shortage of high-quality sperm sources”. Although he stopped donating several years ago, Durov’s sperm is still stored and provided at the AltraVita clinic.

Last summer, Durov attracted attention in an interview with a French magazine when he announced that all of his biological children would inherit an equal share of the inheritance.

Forbes estimates Durov’s net worth at about $17 billion, largely tied to the value of Telegram, which he said he will transfer to a nonprofit foundation. Durov also owns a number of bitcoins purchased since 2013 but did not provide a specific number.

After the announcement of his inheritance, Durov said he received countless messages from people claiming to be his children.

“As long as they can prove they are related to me, they will receive their inheritance after I die, maybe 30 years from now,” Durov said on Lex Fridman’s podcast in October. He also said he plans to make his DNA code public so his biological children can find each other.

Born in 1984 into an intellectual family in St. Petersburg, Durov soon showed his passion for languages ​​and history. He became famous in 2006 when he founded VK, a social network like Russia’s Facebook, before founding Telegram in 2013, shortly before being forced to leave VK.

For many years, Durov has paid out of his own pocket or borrowed capital to maintain Telegram. The app currently has over a billion monthly active users. According to the documentation WSJ Yes, Telegram recorded more than $500 million in profits last year.

However, this platform has also been criticized as a place for spreading extremist information. The company said it has blocked more than 42 million groups and channels that violated its terms of operation, and provided Internet address data in a number of terrorism and criminal investigation cases.

In his personal life, Durov pursues a healthy lifestyle, avoiding alcohol and caffeine, focusing on exercise and getting enough sleep. He had his first two children with his girlfriend when he was still running VK in 2009 and 2010. He then had three more children born in Russia between 2013 and 2017 with Irina Bolgar, a lawyer currently living in Switzerland.

Two people are having a dispute. Bolgar said that in 2023, Durov cut off all financial support for her and her children, including the lease on the house in Geneva where the two lived, because she refused to take the children to Dubai. That same year, Bolgar filed a complaint against Durov in Switzerland, accusing him of beating their youngest child five times.

Spurgeon, Durov’s spokeswoman, asserted that the allegations in the lawsuit were not true and were only part of a child custody dispute initiated by “someone seeking to siphon money” from her client. She added that Bolgar and Durov were never a real couple and that Durov “still provides financial support for all of his children”.

Durov moved Telegram’s corporate headquarters to Dubai in 2017, which he said has less administrative procedures and low taxes. A few years later, he was granted citizenship by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France.

In December 2024, Durov had a child with his ex-girlfriend and famous Hungarian model Diana Bako. She said on social media that she has lived in Dubai since last year, adding that both her child’s grandmother and grandmother are here to take care of the baby.

Durov’s current girlfriend, Juli Vavilova, is an online influencer. At a gala and charity auction related to this year’s Cannes film festival, Durov spent 400,000 euros (about 470,000 USD) to win Vavilova a small role in a film directed by Spike Lee.

Durov once shared on Telegram that he was initially skeptical of sperm donation, but Sergey Yakovenko, founder of the AltraVita clinic, convinced him to consider it a civic duty. Yakovenko said this is not only because Durov’s sperm carries good genes, but also because infertility is on the rise.

“The lack of healthy sperm is becoming an increasingly serious problem globally, and I’m proud to have helped reduce it,” Durov wrote in the 2024 post.

According to a doctor who worked at AltraVita, Durov was not involved in the selection process or medical examination of potential mothers.

Anna Panina, 35 years old, living in Moscow, said she had considered artificial insemination with billionaire Durov’s donated sperm. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to become the mother of a beautiful and intelligent child,” she said.

Durov expressed hope that his actions will encourage other healthy men to participate in sperm donation. “Of course there are risks,” Durov wrote on Telegram in 2024, “but I don’t regret becoming a donor.”