On January 6, 2021, as a crowd of Donald Trump supporters began gathering for a rally near the foot of the Washington Monument, Elies Campo was spending a poignant afternoon at his family's home in Tortosa, Spain. January 6—the feast of the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day—is the high point of the holiday season there, when relatives visit and children open their presents. And Campo, a 38-year-old Spanish engineer who lives in Silicon Valley, had been largely stranded away from home since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As he moved through the house, Campo was surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins, and he got to hold a couple of their babies for the first time. His mind was about as far from the United States as it could possibly be.
That changed around 8 pm, when a friend in the US pinged to ask if Campo had seen the news out of Washington, DC. Then came an avalanche of similar messages about the mob that had just stormed the Capitol building. As Campo watched the scenes of violence unfold on his phone, a question started to eat at him: How was this going to affect his company?
Campo worked at Telegram, a messaging app and social network with a global user base of hundreds of millions. Now, as he looked around various other social media platforms, he noticed that far-right figures were posting links on those sites to their public channels on Telegram and urging their followers to join the app.
Mind racing, Campo excused himself, went upstairs to his room, and continued to scour social media platforms on his laptop and phone. Within six hours, both Facebook and Twitter had blocked Trump's posts, and Campo watched more and more pro-Trump figures, fearful that they would be banned too, flood onto Telegram, bringing their audiences with them. Déu meu, he muttered to himself in Catalan—My God.
In the world of social media, Telegram is a distinct oddity. Often rounding out lists of the world's 10 largest platforms, it has just around 30 core employees, had no source of ongoing revenue until very recently, and—in an era when tech firms face increasing pressure to quash hate speech and misinformation—exercises virtually no content moderation, except to take down illegal pornography and calls for violence. At Telegram it is an article of faith, and a marketing pitch, that the company's platform should be available to all, regardless of politics or ideology. “For us, Telegram is an idea,” Pavel Durov, Telegram's Russian founder, has said. “It is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.”
Campo shared that faith—but as Telegram's head of growth, business, and partnerships, he also bore the brunt of its complications. In the mid-2010s, when the media began referring to Telegram as the “app of choice” for jihadists, it was Campo who fretted most about ISIS' use of the platform. He says he often feels like an anxious parent when messaging Durov. “I'm the nag,” Campo says. What troubled him now was how the influx of insurrection-adjacent Americans would play in the media and with the business partners he had to deal with.
So he wrote a long message to Durov. “Good evening Pavel,” he recalls it opening. “Have you been looking at what's happening in the US? Have you seen Trump is being blocked on other social networks?” He warned that the US far right's embrace of Telegram could “potentially eclipse” a far more flattering story that was, by sheer coincidence, driving its own stampede of new users onto the platform.
That same week, Telegram's much larger rival, WhatsApp, had updated its privacy policy and terms of service. Confusing wording gave many users the false impression that they'd have to begin sharing more of their information with Facebook, WhatsApp's increasingly distrusted parent company. The new policy did not, in fact, require users to share any more data than they had already fed the giant for years (their phone number, their profile names, certain metadata). But many of WhatsApp's 2 billion account holders were spooked anyway, and millions bolted from the app—many of them straight into the arms of Telegram.
Durov, Campo says, threw cold water on his concerns about the rush of Trump supporters. “Compared to the growth we're having from the WhatsApp terms-of-service change, this is insignificant, and just in the US narrative,” Campo recalls Durov replying. If necessary, the CEO added, he might post something on his own public channel on Telegram. Fears unassuaged, Campo stayed up until the early hours staring at his screens.
Sure enough, in the following days, Campo started getting questions from journalists about the mass adoption of Telegram by America's far right. He forwarded these to Durov, recommending that he speak to the media. On January 8, Durov did take to his public channel—but only to hail Telegram's huge global growth and to trash-talk Facebook, which he claimed had a whole team dedicated to figuring out “why Telegram is so popular.” On January 12, Durov posted again to celebrate the arrival of 25 million new users over the previous 72 hours. Telegram, he said, now had a population of more than half a billion. “We've had surges of downloads before,” Durov wrote. “But this time is different.” Two days later he proclaimed, “We may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history.”
Yet while Durov trumpeted global statistics—38 percent of these new users were coming from Asia, he reported, while 27 percent came from Europe, 21 percent from Latin America, and 8 percent from the Middle East—he made no mention of any growth in North America. Not until January 18 did Durov post that his team had been “watching the situation closely” in the US and that Telegram's moderators had blocked hundreds of public calls for violence. But he downplayed the problem, saying that fewer than 2 percent of Telegram's users were in the US.
For Campo, these posts made for awkward reading. Durov had largely ignored his advice, and had declined to run any public statements by him. What's more, despite being Telegram's head of growth—typically a major role at social media firms—Campo was learning all of these statistics from Durov's public channel, like any other subscriber.
This was another highly abnormal thing about Telegram: Campo never got to look at raw user data. “I can't see any internal dashboard with all the numbers,” he told me last May. This contrasted starkly with the standard operating procedure at Campo's previous place of work: WhatsApp.
Back in 2014, after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, Campo had quit in protest against the social media giant's “addictive” algorithms and their “impact on humanity.” Yet at WhatsApp, Campo says, every single employee had access to data on user numbers in different markets. At Telegram, if Campo wanted stats, he had to explain why to his boss. Durov is “very, very, very restrictive,” Campo explains. “Everything has to go through him.”
So if the CEO said that far-right activity in the US was just a blip—well, Campo had to take his word for it. And at Telegram, that was far from the only thing that rested on the word of Pavel Durov.
For years now, the world has fretted over Facebook's—now Meta's—seemingly inexorable dominance: its relentless neutralization of competitors either by acquisition or elimination; its subjugation of politics, culture, and every facet of intimate life to the priorities of an algorithm built for ad sales; its succession of escalating privacy scandals; and its record of disingenuous apologies when it gets caught. But over the past year or so, Mark Zuckerberg's empire has begun to look a little less invulnerable. Lawmakers have increasingly arrayed against it, and at brief moments—like the January 2021 mass exodus from WhatsApp, and a second one that followed a Facebook outage in October—the powerful network effects that drive Meta's supremacy have seemed to shift briefly into reverse. Somehow Telegram, with its tiny staff, has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of those stumbles.
Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app.” This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to turn on the app's “secret chats” function (which few people actually do); and that only individual conversations, not those among groups, can be end-to-end encrypted. For the millions of people who use Telegram under repressive regimes, experts say, that confusion could be costly.
But the term “messaging app” is itself somewhat misleading, in ways that lead many to underestimate Telegram. Over the years, the app has become a deliberate hybrid of a messaging service and a social media platform—a rival not only to WhatsApp and Signal but also, increasingly, to Facebook itself. Users can join public or private channels with unlimited numbers of followers, where anyone can like, share, or comment. They can also join private groups with up to 200,000 members—a scale that dwarfs WhatsApp's 256-member limit. But unlike Facebook, at Telegram there is no targeted advertising and no algorithmic feed.
While Telegram has plenty of channels and groups dedicated to apolitical subjects like Bollywood movies and Miami's tech scene, it has proven particularly well suited to activism. Its blend of private messaging and public channels makes it a perfect organizing tool: ideal for evangelizing in public and then plotting in secret. “I call it the one-two punch,” says Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina who studies Telegram. “You can do both propaganda and planning on the same app.”
It's been vital to pro-democracy protesters from Belarus to Hong Kong, but the global right seems to find Telegram particularly congenial. In Germany, a movement against Covid restrictions used the app to organize huge demonstrations in central Berlin in 2020, leading to the storming of parliament's steps by a mob of extremists, in a sinister foreshadowing of January 6. (The stated aim of some protesters was to show Trump that they were ready for him to liberate Germany from a deep-state conspiracy.) In Brazil, far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has also embraced Telegram, which has been downloaded on about half the phones in the country. Disinformation analysts warn of the danger this poses to the 2022 presidential elections there, the results of which Bolsonaro has threatened to dispute.
In the US, homegrown apps like Parler and Gab also soaked up far-right users after January 6, but both quickly flamed out, suffering catastrophic hacks and, in Parler's case, the loss of Amazon's web hosting. Neither had Telegram's staying power. Soon Donald Trump Jr. began testing the Telegram waters for the outgoing commander in chief. “Big Tech Censorship is getting worse and if these Tyrants banned my father, the President of the United States, who won't they ban?” he tweeted. The Trump movement needed a place that “respects” free speech, he said: “That's why I joined Telegram.”
The following month, Donald Trump Jr.'s public channel reached a million subscribers. A channel named @real_DonaldJTrump—“Reserved for the 45th President of the United States” and publishing “Uncensored posts from the Office of Donald J. Trump”—was also gaining steam; it soon had more than a million subscribers. Popular Trump allies followed suit, and their channels grew rapidly, while Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and QAnon groups also proliferated. According to Squire, who has tracked far-right activity on the platform since 2019, the number of American far-right users on Telegram could easily be around 10 million, which is what Durov reports as the total number of US users on the app. Squire admits, however, that the lack of transparency over the platform's user numbers makes it very difficult to know for sure.
In my several long conversations with Campo, he seemed deeply torn about Telegram. He still felt a profound admiration for Durov, and he saw the surges of new users as personal vindication for quitting his old job at WhatsApp. But he had started to wonder about the lack of transparency and insular culture around his boss—a man whose whims may increasingly influence the fate of democracy around the world.
Durov, 37, has become one of the world's most powerful and meticulously enigmatic tech moguls. After years of professed nomadism, he and Telegram are now officially based in the United Arab Emirates. A recent Instagram post shows Durov sitting cross-legged, shirtless and chiseled, on a rooftop overlooking the Dubai skyline. When he isn't showing off his impressive torso, Durov invariably wears black, which the press rarely fails to describe as an homage to Neo from The Matrix. He interacts with the public almost entirely via his Telegram channel, where he plays philosopher king and CEO on matters of free speech, system architecture, and the virtues of eating an all-fish diet, abstaining from alcohol, and sleeping alone. Inside Telegram, Campo says, the company's inner circle of mainly Russian developers look upon their leader “almost like a divine figure,” addressing their boss with the formal “you” and never contradicting him. In the words of a former employee named Anton Rozenberg: “It's a sect.”
As sects go, Telegram is a remarkably closed one. Despite Campo's recommendations, Durov has neither given an interview nor spoken in public for years, and employees are also, for the most part, incredibly secretive. I reached out to more than 40 people who are close to the company for this story and was ultimately able to speak with nine former and three current associates of Durov. To understand his app's potential impact as it fast becomes one of the world's biggest platforms, you have to understand something even more opaque than Facebook's algorithm: the world inside Telegram.
If the origin story of Facebook involves a set of relationships that formed in a suite of Harvard dorm rooms and then fractured over time, the origin story of Telegram rests on a set of relationships that largely formed even earlier: in childhood bedrooms, grade school math competitions, and university computer labs. And while many of those ties also corroded into acrimony over the years, one relationship has always remained at the center of Telegram: the one between Pavel Durov and his elder brother by four years, Nikolai.
By the time Pavel was born, it was already clear that Nikolai was different from other children. By 3, he was reportedly reading almost like an adult; by 8, he was solving cubic equations; and by the time he was a teenager, he was representing Russia at international olympiads in both math and informatics, eventually becoming a two-time world programming champion. Pavel was impressive too—he started coding at age 10 under Nikolai's tutelage—but the elder Durov was a “genius among geniuses,” says Anton Rozenberg, who met Nikolai in math club as a boy.
Nikolai was also, however, a painfully awkward young man who never quite grew up. For years he remained unusually dependent on his mother, says Rozenberg. “She controls his nearly every step,” Rozenberg would later write, “where to eat, where to go, how many steps to walk from the railway station and which taxi to take.” Pavel was close to their mother in a different way. “I was a self-willed kid that often clashed with teachers,” he has written on his public Telegram channel. “My mom always supported me—she never sided with anybody but her sons.” As Andrei Lopatin, who met the brothers in math club competitions when he was 11, recalls of Pavel, “it seemed that he was a boy who wanted everything to be as he wished.”
Both brothers attended Saint Petersburg State University, where their father was a professor of philology, an academic discipline that encompasses the study of language and literature. Nikolai studied mathematics. Pavel studied philology, wrote poetry, and seemed generally to be following in his father's footsteps—until he started building websites. He created an online library where students in his department could share notes and other study materials, which became so popular that some students started skipping lectures altogether and memorized old exam answers instead, according to Ilya Perekopsky, a fellow philology student and friend of Pavel's.
Pavel then went on to create an online forum, where he called himself “the Architect” and instigated bull sessions about subjects ranging from libertarianism—he himself was an avid enemy of “socialist dictatorships” and a devout free marketeer—to whether it was possible for girls and boys to be friends. “He intentionally provoked discussions on very different topics,” says Perekopsky. Pavel also created pseudonymous accounts to provoke arguments and draw users in, Perekopsky says. “It's kind of marketing, right?” The forum took the university by storm. And Pavel found himself devoting more and more time to his websites.
Pavel's university portals eventually caught the attention of Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, a former schoolmate. Mirilashvili, who had moved to the US, had just seen Facebook take off there and thought something similar could work in Russia. With money Mirilashvili made working for his father, a wealthy Georgian-Israeli real estate mogul, he and Pavel reimagined the university website as a tool for finding childhood classmates and friends. Mirilashvili also brought on board a Russian-Israeli friend named Lev Leviev. In the fall of 2006, the trio became the cofounders of VKontakte—Russian for “in touch.” Pavel Durov initially coded the site on his own. With a simple design and blue and white color scheme, VKontakte looked like one of the many Facebook clones that were popping up around the world.
VK, as the social network came to be known, quickly took off. But bugs on the site multiplied along with new users, even after Nikolai Durov started helping his brother upon returning from a PhD program in Germany. When Rozenberg voluntarily sent a bug report to the Durovs, Pavel thanked him and eventually invited him to join the company as a systems administrator, under Nikolai. Pavel was now focused on management and design. Ilya Perekopsky, Pavel's friend from the philology department, also joined as deputy CEO. Rounding out the team was Andrei Lopatin, Nikolai's old companion from childhood math competitions, who came to work on VK's technical team.
It was an exciting time, Rozenberg says. “During the first years, I worked without holidays from the morning to late evening,” he tells me. Although the team mostly worked remotely, Rozenberg recalls several meetings at the Durovs' home. The brothers still lived with their parents. Their apartment was in a typical Soviet-style building on the northern fringes of St. Petersburg, an area made up of tall, nearly identical tower blocks. Often they worked till late. When Rozenberg left to catch the last metro home, the Durovs' mother would order Pavel and Nikolai to walk him to the metro station. As Rozenberg remembers it, that was the only way for her to tear them away from their screens.
VK was soon on the radar of other would-be world-eating social networks. In 2009, a small delegation from VK paid a visit to Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto. According to Andrew Rogozov, then VK's head of development, the trip was arranged by Russian-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner's investment firm, which had stakes in both companies. As Rogozov recalls, Pavel Durov did not care much for Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, or Chris Cox, its chief product officer, who both seemed uninterested in a long dialog with the VK team. But in Zuckerberg, who invited Durov to his house for dinner that evening, Durov is said to have found a kindred spirit. Both understood the “outdated nature of the state,” Durov is quoted as saying in the 2012 book Durov's Code, by Nickolay Kononov, a journalist and former editor at the Russian edition of Forbes.
According to Kononov's account, Durov and Zuckerberg each saw social networks as a superstructure over humanity that allowed information to spread beyond the centralizing control of governments and states. But Durov felt that Zuckerberg had already caved in to both commercial pressures and the establishment. “The DNA of the company is defined by Sheryl Sandberg, a former Washington lobbyist,” he scoffed. For Rogozov, who also attended the dinner and was struck by Zuckerberg's robotic lack of emotions, the experience of being “in enemy territory” inspired them in a specific way: “That we can compete with these guys, right? Because they have a huge amount of resources, and they're asking us how we do things.” For example, Zuckerberg was keen to learn how VK loaded so fast, despite having a team of fewer than 20 people, compared to Facebook's sprawling staff of more than 1,000 employees. There were also questions on either side about expanding in new markets—Rogozov notes with a grin that, not long afterward, Facebook began catering to the Russian market, while VK launched an international version in several different languages.
In 2010, VK moved to an illustrious address on a central boulevard in St. Petersburg. The company's new headquarters was in Singer House, a landmark building with an art nouveau facade, giant sculptures of winged figures above the entrances, a domed copper and glass tower, and chandeliers adorning the ceilings. “We were very proud to work in a place like that,” says Lopatin. “However, it seemed that the company started to grow too much.”
As VK became by far the biggest social network in Russia, its users brazenly flouted copyright laws, uploading and sharing pirated movies and music. But Durov was blasé. “The best thing about Russia at that time was the internet sphere was completely not regulated,” he later told The New York Times. “In some ways, it was more liberal than the United States.” Soon enough, however, operating in Russia became more of a liability—one that Durov had to struggle to turn to his advantage.
In December 2011, Vladimir Putin's United Russia party dominated parliamentary elections amid widespread claims of fraud. Huge protests broke out in the winter cold, and activist leader Alexei Navalny was among hundreds arrested. When the administrator of an 80,000-strong pro-Navalny VK group complained on Twitter that users had been blocked from posting on VK, Durov replied to assure them that his team had fixed the problem. “Everything is OK,” he elaborated in a private message. “In recent days, the FSB”—the successor to the KGB—“has asked us to block opposition groups, including yours. We don't do this on principle. I don't know how this could end for us, but we are standing firm.” Then he took the brazen step of making his conflict with the security services public, tweeting out the letter the FSB had sent to VK along with his “official response” as CEO: a photo of a blue-eyed dog wearing a blue hoodie with its tongue hanging out.
Some hailed Durov as a hero, but a source who worked for VK at the time believes the CEO quickly realized something: “If the media made him the chief oppositionist, he wouldn't last long.” Having been largely invisible before his run-in with the Kremlin, Durov began cultivating an increasingly mercurial public profile. In a letter to an online newspaper, he claimed to be apolitical and joked that he did not really support democracy. In May 2012, on the day of a large city festival in St. Petersburg, he again made the news after he and VK's deputy CEO, Perekopsky, started folding 5,000-ruble bills—about $155—into paper planes and tossing them out of Singer House's windows into the festival crowds below. Rozenberg recalls watching Durov and Perekopsky laugh as people scrambled for the cash outside.
Moreover, Durov's relationship with the Kremlin was more ambiguous than it seemed. Little more than a year after the protests, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta published an alleged leaked letter from Durov to Vladislav Surkov, Putin's first deputy chief of staff at the time and the man credited with shaping the Russian president's media strategy. Durov apparently assured Surkov that VK had been “actively providing information about thousands of users of our site in the form of IP addresses, cell phone numbers, and other information necessary to identify them.” He also warned the Kremlin that blocking opposition groups would only drive them to Facebook, beyond the government's reach. Although he denied the letter was real, Durov later acknowledged that he and Surkov had met at VK's offices several times between 2009 and 2011.
Then, just days after the Novaya Gazeta scoop, Durov was reportedly involved in a hit-and-run accident—with a cop. Durov denied that he had been driving but joked about the incident on VK: “When you run over a policeman, it is important to drive back and forth—so that all the pulp comes out.” Soon after, Russian police entered VK's offices. “Suddenly 20 silent men in leather jackets appear,” Nikolai Durov posted.
The next day, it emerged that VK's two other cofounders had sold their stakes in the company to a Russian financial investment firm called United Capital Partners. Pavel Durov portrayed all of it as a coordinated Kremlin-linked attack, and Western media lapped up the story—never mind that Durov had been in open conflict with his cofounders for months since learning they were negotiating a sale of their shares behind his back. When he missed a court hearing related to the hit-and-run, there were reports that he had left Russia and was in the US—specifically, at the offices of a company called Digital Fortress in Buffalo, New York. Rumors swirled that Durov was creating a brand-new social network in America. And then, on August 14, 2013, a new app appeared on the iTunes Store: Telegram.
Telegram's logo was a paper plane, recalling Pavel's flying rubles above the crowd at Singer House. Its developer was listed as Digital Fortress, the nominal owner of which was Axel Neff, an American who had met Perekopsky in the US years earlier. And its architecture was based on a custom data protocol called MTProto, developed by Nikolai Durov. Andrei Lopatin says he began helping Nikolai write the protocol in 2012. Now, as Telegram officially launched, Pavel Durov asked Lopatin to become CEO of a Russian parent company called Telegraph, “where all Telegram developers worked,” according to Lopatin. Meanwhile, Pavel was still CEO of VK.
The two firms were, in fact, hopelessly entangled. Nikolai left his position at VK to focus on Telegram, but Rozenberg says he didn't even change offices at Singer House. According to Rozenberg, who took over from Nikolai as the new technical lead at VK, some staffers were confused about which spaces belonged to which company.
In his early descriptions of Telegram, Pavel Durov often cited Edward Snowden's revelations about government spyware, and he claimed that he and Nikolai had established the app over worries about government surveillance in Russia. Apart from ordinary chats, a “secret chats” function would use end-to-end encryption and store messages locally on users' devices. The app's cloud servers, where all other messages were stored, would be scattered throughout various jurisdictions to make it more difficult for any one government to force Telegram to give up any data; the company's ownership, too, would sit in a bird's nest of shell companies. Yet Durov also claimed that Telegram would remain nonprofit to avoid legal and commercial pressure.
As Telegram quickly began to take off on just about every continent, VK's new majority shareholder, United Capital Partners, seemed to be eyeing the new app jealously. The firm accused Durov of spending irregularities and of developing Telegram using VK's resources. Durov, in turn, began gathering his loyal core team of developers around him, calling VK's new owner “a Kremlin company” and an enemy. In January 2014, Perekopsky left his position at VK after a falling out with Durov. (Perekopsky says he cannot discuss what happened, for legal reasons, but acknowledges that there was a conflict and they “disagreed.”)
A drawn-out legal battle for control of VK and Telegram ensued. In a bid to get its hands on Telegram, United Capital Partners acquired three shell companies associated with the new app from Neff, Perekopsky's American friend. Durov said that Neff had “betrayed” him. (Neff declined requests from WIRED to comment.)
With control over Telegram hanging in the balance, Durov did something drastic. In April 2014, he and his team got on a series of planes and flew from St. Petersburg to Amsterdam, New York City, Buffalo, Washington, DC, and Boston to personally visit the data centers housing Telegram's servers and ensure that United Capital Partners couldn't gain access to them. Lopatin remembers it as a frantic trip, and they finished it in the nick of time: After their last flight touched down, Durov learned that he had finally been fired from VK.
Afterward, Durov cast his adversary not as a single investment firm but as an entire regime. “I'm out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” he told TechCrunch from Dubai. “Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He went so far as to obtain citizenship from the tiny Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and Nevis. But while Durov claimed to the media that the Kremlin had forced him from VK and into exile, multiple sources familiar with Durov's departure from VK told WIRED that United Capital Partners' supposed Kremlin links were insignificant. “Most big and medium-size corps are pro-Kremlin; no news there,” says Steve Korshakov, a programmer and entrepreneur who joined Telegram in 2013.
And in any event, Durov eventually got what he wanted out of the deal—full control of Telegram—in part through the intercession of an even more powerful ally of the Kremlin. In January 2014, Durov had sold his stake in VK to a businessman named Ivan Tavrin, who in turn sold those shares to an internet giant called Mail.ru Group, which duly bought out United Capital Partners in the fall of 2014 to the tune of $1.5 billion. As part of the deal, the investment firm agreed to renounce its claims on Telegram. According to Tavrin, this was largely thanks to one of Mail.ru's controlling shareholders, Alisher Usmanov, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Russia, who, like many Russian oligarchs, had ties to the Kremlin.
“Without the help of Usmanov, Durov would not own Telegram today,” says Tavrin, who insists Durov's departure from VK was all about business, not politics. “Pavel is a king of PR and marketing. Probably one of the best people in the world. I think he wanted to play the good guy with the West.”
If Durov's team at Telegram hoped for a steadier ship now that he had undisputed control, they were wrong. The founder's relationships with some of his staffers continued to deteriorate. In October 2014, Andrei Lopatin, who had known the Durovs since he was 11, was axed from his role as CEO of Telegram's parent company, Telegraph. For some reason, Lopatin says, Durov had started bullying him. “I still don't understand why,” Lopatin says. And Korshakov, who had joined Telegram to develop the Android version of the app, found himself on the outs with Durov after less than a year on the job. Korshakov chalked it up to the founder's leadership style, explaining that Durov basically wants his employees to focus on trying to please him: “You have to figure out what he likes.”
In the world at large, meanwhile, Telegram's creation myth became sharper and more colorful. In a December 2014 interview with The New York Times, Durov claimed that the inspiration for Telegram came when a “SWAT team” visited his apartment after he'd stood up to the FSB in December 2011. With armed men lurking outside his door, he'd called his brother. “I realized I don't have a safe means of communication with him,” Durov told the Times. “That's how Telegram started.”
In interviews, Durov would depict Telegram as a distributed company, free of any one country's jurisdiction and security apparatus—and, above all, beyond the grip of Putin's Russia. He portrayed himself to the Times as an “exile,” a depiction that would go on to reappear in countless press accounts. The paper described him as a “nomad, moving from country to country every few weeks with a small band of computer programmers.” Durov's Instagram feed seemed to bear this out, with snapshots of glamorous hotels and landmarks in the places he stayed—in Beverly Hills, Paris, London, Rome, Venice, Bali, Helsinki.
But the reality of Telegram's day-to-day operations was considerably more mundane: Durov still held a lease at Singer House. Lopatin, the former Telegraph CEO, says that the founder returned to Russia in the autumn of 2014: “When I left Telegram, he was in Singer House every working day. All other members of the team were in Russia also.” Other VK and Telegram employees from the time concur that Pavel Durov was often at Singer House. Nikolai, having finally moved out of his mother's apartment, was working from a flat nearby, says Anton Rozenberg, who helped him furnish the new home. Rozenberg, who was between jobs after resigning from VK in solidarity with Pavel, says he often met with Nikolai during this period to go to the movies or play board games. Lopatin says that, before he was fired, the team did travel abroad together at times, but most days found them in St. Petersburg.
The myth, if that's what it was, certainly helped market Telegram internationally. By early 2016, the app was approaching 100 million users. And the hardcore team of Telegram stalwarts was constantly adding new updates to attract more users away from other messaging apps. Their work also, at times, attracted other tech entrepreneurs. Elies Campo joined the company in early 2015, after managing to secure a meeting with Pavel Durov in Palo Alto through a mutual friend. (“It was hard to meet him,” recalls Campo, who wondered whether Durov suspected him of being a WhatsApp spy.) From the start, Campo saw his new boss as a “visionary,” he says. “I think he's the most sophisticated product thinker that I've ever met.”
It was, Campo says, “very exciting to see how Pavel thought about messaging and all the features that he was thinking of implementing.” In 2015 alone, Telegram's small team created a platform for users to create and publish their own chatbots; they added reply, mention, and hashtag functions to group chats; they added in-app video playback and a new photo editor; and, for the first time, they introduced public channels for those wanting to broadcast to an unlimited number of followers. Only Facebook, with its much larger staff, was adding features at a comparable rate.
Campo remembers it as a dynamic time. He continued to live in Palo Alto, joining the app's largely Russian developers on their occasional jaunts around the world, including in his hometown of Barcelona. “The whole team traveled together,” he says. For Campo, in other words, the myth was true. Echoing his boss's rhetoric, he would say that Telegram “doesn't belong in a country, it's a global product.”
In 2016, Rozenberg also joined Telegram, tasked with combating spam. With none of the shareholder conflicts that had tortured the VK era, Rozenberg says, it was a “dream job.” But in January 2017, he fell out dramatically with his old friend Nikolai. Rozenberg claims it was over a romantic dispute, and that Nikolai wanted him gone. (Nikolai did not respond to requests for comment.)
Rozenberg says that Pavel expressed some sympathy for the position he was in. But the CEO was not about to side against his brother. In April, after refusing to resign, Rozenberg was fired for alleged “absenteeism,” and yet another long-term colleague and friend of the Durovs was cast by the wayside. But Rozenberg didn't go quietly. In September 2017, he published an account of his time with the Durovs on Medium, exposing some of Telegram's alleged contradictions, beginning with its address: Why were the employees of a Russian exile's distributed company based in Russia?
In response, Durov told Russian media that Rozenberg in fact worked for Telegraph, which he described as a completely separate company to which Telegram outsourced its moderation work. He said the last time the Telegram team had met at Singer House was in early 2015, and he insinuated that Rozenberg “suffers from mental illness.” Yet in his battle with United Capital Partners in 2014, Durov himself had revealed his links to the Russia-based Telegraph LLC in court documents. Rozenberg also shared messages with WIRED that seem to show that Durov regarded him as an employee.
Perhaps most troubling, however, was Rozenberg's claim that his Telegram chat history mysteriously vanished during his conflict with the Durov brothers. The chats were magically restored the following morning, and Pavel chalked it up to a small technical failure. But Rozenberg wondered if Nikolai had been behind the deletion. How secure could Telegram really be if a petty dispute was enough to jeopardize a user's information? “All your chats, except the secret chats,” Rozenberg says, “absolutely all groups, all channels, are stored on the Telegram servers. So Telegram has access to that information.”
As Telegram became wildly popular in places under harsh regimes, like Iran, security experts also began calling Telegram's privacy architecture into question. “Telegram will face increasing pressure over time to collaborate with the Iranian government's demands,” tweeted Edward Snowden at the end of 2017, arguing that Pavel Durov's moral commitment to protecting users was not enough of a bulwark against this kind of pressure. Taking on the voice of the Telegram founder, Durov's onetime idol tweeted: “Trust us not to turn over data. Trust us not to read your messages. Trust us not to close your channel. Maybe @Durov is an angel. I hope so! But angels have fallen before.”
Around this time, Durov moved Telegram's official base to Dubai, finally severing the brothers' long ties to Singer House and resolving some of the apparent contradictions in the team's relationship to Russia. But if the controversies raised by Snowden or Rozenberg's post made any dent in Telegram's growth, it was hard to tell. The app was now nearing 200 million users, who were sending 70 billion messages a day. Telegram was phenomenally popular in Asia, Latin America, and increasingly in Europe. It remained free to users, with no advertisements. But supporting 200 million users is not cheap. Durov had walked away from VK with a reported $300 million, but he was still bankrolling the four-year-old app himself. Telegram needed to find a way to pay for its soaring server costs. Selling equity and risking more epic shareholder battles was unattractive. But Durov could not go on funding Telegram forever. And so he began devising a daring new plan.
In June 2017, Ilya Perekopsky was driving a Mercedes convertible down a winding road while vacationing in the South of France when he saw a message pop onto his phone. It was Pavel Durov. His old friend, boss, and onetime adversary was suggesting they have a formal meeting. In recent years, Perekopsky had been delving into the cryptocurrency market. From time to time he would send links to Durov: “I was really like the evangelist for it,” Perekopsky says. Now he was delighted to read the message: Durov wanted to meet to discuss a new crypto venture.
They arranged to meet in Paris, where Perekopsky says Durov often spent time in the summer. From the first meeting, Perekopsky realized Durov's project was unprecedented in scale. “He just really believed in the idea of creating a real mass-market cryptocurrency that could circulate between people without actual banks involved,” says Perekopsky. Over the coming months they met several more times in Paris and Dubai as Durov's plan crystallized. And by October 2017, Durov had officially brought Perekopsky back into the fold to “help run point” on the new project.
Perekopsky had recently raised $30 million for a crypto trading platform called Blackmoon; now he introduced Durov to John Hyman, a British investment banking veteran he had met in the process. Hyman joined the small team running the business end of the new project, becoming Telegram's chief investment adviser. In mid-December, Durov flew to London to meet the pair and finalize the details, and Hyman began arranging meetings with potential investors during his visit. Soon after that, their plan went public.
They were going to build a new blockchain platform called the Telegram Open Network, along with a native cryptocurrency called grams. The brains behind TON, Nikolai Durov, was described in TON's primer as a “guru in distributed systems.” The system Nikolai had designed promised to be faster than current blockchain technology; while Bitcoin and Ethereum were limited to seven and 15 transactions per second, respectively, TON's white paper promised millions of transactions per second. The ambitious plan would test Telegram's developers to their limits.
The idea was to leverage Telegram's huge user base to provide the “critical mass to push cryptocurrencies toward widespread adoption.” Cryptocurrency had hitherto been limited to those with the patience and know-how to set up digital wallets and register with cryptocurrency exchanges. But with digital wallets built directly into the Telegram app—like Facebook Pay, only with cryptocurrency—TON would instantly connect millions of ordinary users to the blockchain and turn cryptocurrency mainstream in one fell swoop. TON would ultimately become “a Visa/Mastercard alternative for the new decentralized economy.” To show off Telegram's distributed credentials, the primer hailed the company's independent server clusters scattered across continents and jurisdictions. Eventually the goal was for TON to pass out of Telegram's hands to the “global open source community.”
It sounded like a utopian plot that would revolutionize the way money itself worked. “It was really supposed to change the world,” says Perekopsky. It would also solve Telegram's biggest conundrum: how to raise money without relinquishing control. Instead of selling equity to investors, Durov was going to create his own currency—or, rather, a whole new integrated economy, revolving around Telegram.
Hyman marveled at how the Telegram team worked. He had never seen anything like it, he says. At Morgan Stanley, where Hyman spent 17 years in senior roles, up to 40 times as many people might have worked on a project like this. “And they wouldn't have done it any better,” he says. Investors swooned. They “enjoyed the centralized nature of the process,” Hyman says. “It was highly efficient—we could move quicker and make decisions more rapidly.” For Hyman, it was an example of Durov's passion for disrupting the traditional bureaucracies blocking the flow of information and finance.
New cryptocurrencies are often launched by means of an initial coin offering, which offers tokens of the currency for sale, like shares of a company going public. Telegram ultimately secured $1.7 billion—then the biggest ICO in history—from 175 investors. But there were red flags from the start. Although the company initially talked up a public ICO, the offering was ultimately kept private. There was little way of knowing who the private investors were or where the money had come from. In a response to a business colleague asking just this question, Hyman wrote: Russia, Israel, and the “Pavel fan club.”
Then targets for the project kept being missed. Durov told a friend and investor that Telegram's tech team, which was balancing work at the app and on TON, was “stretched too thin.” That was putting it lightly. At the time, Telegram was fending off a ban inside Russia because the company had refused to hand over its encryption keys to the security services. In a dramatic game of cat and mouse, Russia's telecom regulator ended up blocking much of Russia's internet in a massive case of collateral damage, but Telegram—likely through a technique called “domain fronting,” which hides the source of web traffic—managed to keep its platform accessible to Russians with hardly any interruption. (Some time later, when Alexander Lukashenko's regime in Belarus engineered an election-day internet blackout, Telegram used similar “anti-censorship” techniques to stay online—and ended up becoming the main communications medium during a period of national unrest.)
TON's test network finally came online in January 2019, half a year late. But as the official launch neared—meaning that investors would be authorized to sell their grams—the US Securities and Exchange Commission brought everything to a sudden halt.
The SEC claimed that the resale of grams would constitute the distribution of unregistered securities. It also criticized TON for serving as a clandestine fundraising drive. The SEC claimed that the company had spent 90 percent of its $1.7 billion ICO on paying off Telegram's expenses without ever distinguishing between money spent on the app and on TON. Emails showed that Hyman was also aware that there was already a gray market for reselling grams before the launch, although this was prohibited by the agreement investors had signed.
“It was a total shock,” Perekopsky says of the SEC's lawsuit. “It was one of the most disappointing days of my life.” Perekopsky claims they had been in communication with the SEC throughout the process and that Telegram had hired “the best law firms in the world” to make sure they were in compliance. Perekopsky also rejects the idea that TON was merely a fundraising vehicle for Telegram, saying there are “easier” ways to raise money than building a whole new blockchain.
Pavel Cherkashin, a Russian based in San Francisco who invested in TON, was one of many who felt betrayed. “What made me furious was understanding that Durov took the money from what he raised for TON and used that to support Telegram, which wouldn't bring any value to the investors,” he says. In Cherkashin's view, Durov had the technical know-how and the product vision to make TON work, but he failed at building the business infrastructure needed to make it succeed—because he did not want to relinquish control.
As for Perekopsky, he sees no issue with using TON cash to pay for Telegram's running costs. “Frankly speaking, we never hid the fact that the money would be used for Telegram and for the blockchain,” he says.
At first, says Perekopsky, Durov was not willing to give up. “We thought if we go to the courts, we can fight and we can win, since we are 100 percent right,” Perekopsky recalls. But after the SEC questioned Durov for two days in Dubai, it soon became clear that the plan had reached its end. “The US can use its control over the dollar and the global financial system to shut down any bank or bank account in the world,” Durov wrote afterward, adding that “other countries do not have full sovereignty over what to allow on their territory.” He blamed the TON debacle on an “overly centralized world.” There was no hint of an apology.
Hyman believes that regulators may have come for TON because it was “truly some kind of disruptive threat” to traditional financial institutions. In fact, the SEC had been cracking down on ICOs in general since 2017, issuing fines to some and shutting down others. But none had attracted anything close to as much investment as TON, which would have granted millions of ordinary Telegram users easy access to crypto. Cherkashin believes it was no coincidence that Facebook started working on its own cryptocurrency and blockchain in earnest around the same time that Telegram did—he heard rumors that Zuckerberg was furious when he first read about TON. By issuing currency, a social media platform could disrupt one of the most important functions of the nation-state. Durov and Zuckerberg would have both been acutely aware of this.
After TON's failure, Perekopsky stayed on at Telegram as vice president. In March 2021, he helped raise more than $1 billion through selling five-year bonds in Telegram, a portion of which went to paying back investors—although US investors, including Cherkashin, got back only 72 percent. At the outset of the TON project, the primer had brimmed over with idealism. “Telegram was founded in 2013 by libertarians to preserve freedom through encryption,” it explained, name-checking Wikipedia as “a role model for the Telegram founders.” But the SEC's case made TON sound more like an elaborate money-making machine.
In July 2021, the Pegasus Project—an international journalistic investigation into various governments' use of spyware made by the NSO Group, an Israeli tech company—listed one of Durov's phone numbers as a target of the firm's digital espionage tool. The investigation suggested that the United Arab Emirates' rulers were the likely client.
For security experts, this news served as a reminder that in moving from Russia to Dubai in 2017, Telegram had merely shifted from one authoritarian jurisdiction to another. But Durov was unperturbed. Ever since 2011, when he lived in Russia, he said, he had assumed his phones were “compromised” and took precautions accordingly.
In general, Durov has displayed none of the antagonism toward the UAE—a regime accused of countless, systemic human rights abuses—that he once did toward Russia. Perekopsky assured me that Telegram has never experienced “even a hint of” pressure in Dubai, and he was fulsome in his praise for the emirate's leaders. “It's not like a government,” Perekopsky said. “It's more like businessmen managing the country—very pragmatic, very fast at making decisions.”
As Durov's run-ins with the Kremlin recede into the past, authoritarian surveillance has, in some ways, ceased to be the symbolic foil that it once was for Telegram. Instead, Durov has increasingly cast his platform in heroic opposition to Facebook, Apple, and Google. (Facebook, because that is his main competitor; Apple and Google, because Telegram must abide by their rules in order to stay on app stores.) In a post to his channel early last year, Durov—the erstwhile libertarian scourge of socialist dictatorships—claimed that he had come to reject what he saw as the old-fashioned opposition between capitalism and socialism. “I prefer to think in terms of ‘centralization vs decentralization,’” he wrote. “Capitalist monopolies and socialist dictatorships are equally bad.”
In its battle to overtake the capitalist monopolies of Silicon Valley, Telegram has come to fill a yawning space that has opened up as Big Tech's moderation standards have tightened. Around the world, there are daily news reports about Telegram channels and groups full of anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, and far-right provocateurs using the app to spread disinformation and organize protests—especially since Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube started clamping down on such content last year. “In my 20 years of managing discussion platforms,” Durov wrote in 2021, “I noticed that conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators.” In June, the German government sued Telegram for failing to abide by rules requiring social media companies to police complaints and have a designated contact person in the country. As Germany has imposed more stringent health protocols to tackle the Omicron variant, activity there has only gotten more extreme.
Since January 6, 2021, meanwhile, the app's position among the Trump movement has continued to consolidate. Channels owned by far-right figures are mushrooming: Trump lawyer turned election conspiracy theorist Lin Wood is nearing a million subscribers; former 8chan administrator Ron Watkins has almost half a million. Among the Trump-backed elected politicians who have opened thriving channels are far-right congressmembers Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, and Lauren Boebert.
In August 2021, Telegram hit 1 billion total downloads. During Facebook's disastrous, six-hour global outage in October, the app welcomed 70 million new “refugees” in a single day, according to Durov.
But as Telegram came closer to fulfilling its destiny and catching up with WhatsApp, Elies Campo continued to brood. “We're portraying ourselves as a company that's open, that's supposed to be for freedom of communication and transparency between users,” he said during one of our meetings in Ciutadella, a stately park dotted with monuments on the edge of Barcelona's old town. “And on the other side, we're completely opaque on how we work.” He wondered whether what he saw as Telegram's insular, even distrustful company culture was holding it back.
The more he spoke, the more I gathered that this culture had estranged Campo too. At the last company retreat before the pandemic in summer 2019, Campo recalled, Durov had rented a large house in a small town in Finland surrounded by lakes and pine forests. When the whole group came together for meals, the conversation was in Russian. “I am the only one who speaks English with Pavel,” Campo says. “It naturally generates this point of friction.” He also sensed that the team distrusted him for living in Silicon Valley and for supposedly having an American mindset. Once, while Campo was trying to set up business partnerships between Telegram and US companies, Campo says Durov wondered aloud whether he had “economic interests” in the companies and whether that was why he wanted to “work with them so badly.”
Over the course of the year, Campo started making preparations to leave Telegram. He spent the fall on his last major project there, helping to roll out new features aimed at finally monetizing the app. Under the new plan, large channel owners will be able to publish sponsored posts and offer paid subscriptions, from which Telegram will take a cut. (Telegram claims it will never offer targeted ads based on users' data.)
Prior to our final call in late October, Campo did something unusual. Until then, we had mostly communicated on Telegram, using it for both messages and calls. But this time he wrote, “Pinged u on another platform.” I saw that he had added me on Signal. Calling him there, I asked why he didn't want to talk on Telegram. “Because,” he said, “who knows?”
Was there a chance that Telegram could monitor someone's private communications? “Technically, it's possible,” said Campo. To do so at scale would be difficult, he said, but encryption between user and cloud server could potentially be deactivated on a target account. “I don't know if it's happening or not.”
As I was winding up my reporting the following month, I managed to speak to another senior Telegram executive: Ilya Perekopsky. In November I wrote to him for the ninth time, having never received a substantial response. This time Perekopsky replied within 20 minutes and asked if I was in Barcelona. By sheer coincidence, he said, he had just landed from Dubai. Two days later we met at an elegant beachside restaurant just south of Barcelona, near where Perekopsky's parents have a house. With his dark blond quiff and high cheekbones, Perekopsky reminded me of a Russian David Bowie in a checkered shirt under a yellow puffy vest.
Over grilled sea bass, beneath an unseasonably hot sun, Perekopsky apologized for not replying sooner. He explained that he had shown Durov my email out of concern that I was writing a “one-sided” article. “I think it's better to respond in person,” Perekopsky told his boss, who he said quickly approved the meeting. “We really don't care too much about communicating with the external world, because we think that it is just gonna defocus us,” said Perekopsky. Durov, he said, prefers to use his channel, where his words cannot be twisted or “censored” by a journalist.
Perekopsky was eager, however, to discuss what he called “censorship” from Google and Apple, which he said had both recently required Telegram to block public channels that were pushing anti-vaccine narratives and coronavirus disinformation. “I mean, this Covid is very funny stuff,” he said. “It is 100 percent censorship, what they are doing.” He seemed genuinely taken aback by it. “We just think people should have their opinion, right? If they disagree, they can disagree,” he said. “They can use Telegram to express their opinions. From our side, we always stay neutral.”
As for Trump, Perekopsky claimed that the company doesn't pay much attention to his movement's migration to Telegram. He described the January 2021 windfall of American right-wingers as both unexpected and amusing. “It was funny that they didn't find a better platform in the US itself to express their opinion,” Perekopsky said. “It's probably just proof that we are the only independent platform where there is no censorship and where you can express your opinion.” Eventually he allowed that the American influx was more than just amusing. “We were proud, a little bit,” he said. He recalled a conversation he'd had with Durov that week in January. “'It is a mark of quality that shows we are a neutral platform,'” he said the founder told him.
As the sun began to dip and the air cooled, Perekopsky hastened to clarify—as Durov has often done on his public channel—that the company takes calls to violence seriously and acts swiftly and consistently to eliminate illegal content. Experts disagree. Megan Squire, the researcher, has found that many far-right posts calling for violence remained up for months. Anthony Fauci, the US president's chief medical adviser, and his daughters were all recently doxed by a far-right Telegram channel, and Squire's own address was published in a Proud Boy group in January and remained there for months, despite her reporting it repeatedly. Perekopsky said Telegram had updated its terms to ban doxing in early 2021 and promised to look into Squire's case. (Her address was finally removed a month later, after I brought it up.)
Finally, I wanted to ask about the culture at Telegram itself. Campo and Rozenberg hadn't been the only ones to imply that there was a cultish atmosphere around Durov. “Being a part of the team really makes reality seem different for you,” Andrei Lopatin had told me. “I was very lucky to be able to leave.” But Perekopsky disagreed with the notion that Durov had created a culture of fierce loyalty and obedience, or that no one ever disagreed with him. He insisted that there was little hierarchy at all inside the company, describing Telegram's structure as “horizontal.” Rather than command, Durov prefers to persuade everyone to “share his vision,” Perekopsky said. “He is very persuasive! Extremely persuasive.”
Hyman—who agreed to talk to me after I'd spoken with Perekopsky, and who still provides financial advice to Telegram as a consultant—also used the word “horizontal” to describe Telegram, and told me it's “bollocks” to say there's a culture of distrust and fierce loyalty to Durov: “It's a very demanding, Darwinian company. And I imagine not everybody has been as successful.” Durov did not respond to requests to be interviewed or to detailed fact-checking questions. His brother Nikolai and Telegram's communications department also never responded to WIRED.
In his February post about “centralization vs decentralization,” Durov himself suggested that Facebook had been losing ground to Telegram because his app's small team eschewed centralization and excessive hierarchy. Which of course points up the question: How exactly is an opaque group of 30 programmers, gathered around a charismatic leader in Dubai, less centralized than a large company? Durov implied a kind of answer in his post. “Humans have evolved to perform best in small groups of less than 150 people,” he wrote. “In a natural environment, every small community is able to produce an outstanding leader.”
If Durov is that natural leader within Telegram, it remains to be seen whether Telegram can continue its climb toward becoming a natural leader among platforms. The company's nascent monetization strategy is modest at best. And around the world, the platform appears to be headed for multiple showdowns. Since the beginning of 2022, officials in Germany and Brazil have threatened to ban Telegram over its unchecked traffic in misinformation; in the latter country, authorities are thinking of blocking the app during the run-up to the October presidential election. But of course, Telegram has outfoxed government blocks before.
Neither of these standoffs had come to a head at the time of my lunch with Perekopsky, but it was easy enough to see them on the horizon. As I sat with him, I thought back to the conversation Zuckerberg and Durov allegedly had more than a decade ago. Both saw their nascent social networks as transcendent structures that would free communications from control by the state: governments and regulators reduced to the level of nuisances, rendered obsolete before the liberating force of a platform. Thinking this under a waning winter sun as my conversation with Telegram's VP concluded, I felt a chill.
This article appears in the March, 2022 issue. Subscribe now.
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