Pavel Durov is a young Russian programmer and billionaire, whose biography is known, first of all, for the creation of the VKontakte social network and the Telegram messenger. Recently, Durov has been living abroad, and his personal life is under a veil of secrecy.
Biography
Pavel Durov was born in 1984 in the family of the scientist Valery Durov. The family of the future computer genius lived in Turin, but after a few years he returned to Russia, where he became a student at the Academic Gymnasium. In addition to the main direction - philology, Durov studied programming with interest. Having successfully graduated from the gymnasium, the young man continued to receive a higher philological education at St. Petersburg State University. In 2006 he graduated from the institution with honors.
In his last year at university, Pavel Durov learned from a friend about the social network Facebook, popular in the West, and got the idea to create a similar project in Russia. Initially, the plans for the site (Pavel's brother Nikolai also joined in its development) were not ambitious: it was planned to create an online community for students, which eventually received the laconic name "Students.ru" and remained closed to all users for some time.
The site quickly grew in a functional direction and gained a lot of fans, so it was decided to name the social network "VKontakte" and open it to everyone. In two years, the number of users of the project exceeded 20 million, and Pavel Durov became one of the youngest Russian millionaires. To date, the growth of the social network does not stop, however, Pavel Durov no longer takes part in its development: in 2014 he sold his stake to Mail.ru Group. The exact reason for this decision is still unknown.
Since 2013, Durov has been developing his second project - the Telegram messenger, which quickly became popular all over the world. The messaging program contains a unique data encryption algorithm that the Russian government demanded access to in 2017. Pavel refused to cooperate, for which unsuccessful attempts were made to block the service in the country. Durov himself has not lived in Russia for several years and prefers to live by traveling from one country to another.
Personal life
Pavel Durov has always positioned himself as a fierce opponent of the established social foundations. He is called a typical sociopath and just an eccentric. It is believed that it is workaholism and special views on life that do not allow him to start a family. And yet there are rumors about the programmer's novels with famous models Alena Shishkova, Victoria Odintsova and Daria Bondarenko. According to some reports, the latter could be his civil family, and the couple have children.
The creator of VKontakte periodically communicates with fans through his page on it, as well as his profile on Instagram. He speaks negatively about the social and political foundations in the country and claims that he will return to his homeland only after they change in a positive direction.
