Telegram’s Durov to split $17B fortune among 100 sperm-donor babies

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said he wants to leave his nearly $20 billion fortune to 100 children he’s fathered through sperm donations.

The eccentric tech founder has a history of tangling with the Kremlin over free speech and was charged by French officials last year for allegedly allowing sex abuse and drug trafficking crimes to run rampant on his encrypted messaging app. He has denied those charges.

The billionaire has written a will that splits his $17.1 billion fortune, according to Forbes, among his six children with three partners, as well as 100 kids across 12 countries he fathered through sperm donations stretching back 15 years, Durov told France’s Le Point magazine on Thursday.

“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,” he told Le Point.

“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.”

Durov, 40, said he does not want his children to have access to his fortune for 30 years.

“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,” he told the magazine.

Durov faces accusations from the mother of three of his children that he withheld financial support, led a secret double life and struck their then-three-year-old son so hard it sent him “across the room,” according to two criminal complaints filed in 2023 and 2024.

He has a somewhat bizarre social media presence, posting a photo of himself shirtless in a barn with baby goats earlier this year to wish Telegram users a happy Easter.

Years earlier, in a 2017 Instagram post that went viral, he mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin for practically the same thing – calling on users to post photos of themselves bare-chested in the “Putin Shirtless Challenge.”

Durov had been the target of Russian state blacklisting after he refused to shut down activists on VKontakte, a platform he created known as the Russian version of Facebook, including a group led by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Durov reportedly fled the country after he was involved in a traffic accident that left a police officer slightly injured. Around the same time, a private equity firm linked to the Kremlin bought a hefty stake in VK and pushed out the founding partners who backed Durov, according to The Moscow Times.

In March, Durov said he had returned to his home in Dubai after Paris officials had arrested him over the summer and banned him from leaving the country.

His encrypted messaging app Telegram, which boasts more than 1 billion active users, has become an indispensable communication tool during the Russia-Ukraine war. 

Government officials have used the app to send out air raid warnings and citizens have documented war horrors firsthand.

But the app has come under fire for also allowing extremist groups like the Islamic State, white nationalists and conspiracy theorists to use the platform.