Pavel Durov is a young Russian programmer and billionaire whose biography is known primarily for the creation of the VKontakte social network and the Telegram messenger. Recently, Durov lives abroad, and his personal life is under the cover 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 a few years later returned to Russia, where he became a student of the Academic Gymnasium. In addition to the main direction - philology, Durov studied programming with interest. Having successfully graduated from high school, the young man continued to receive higher philological education at St. Petersburg State University. In 2006, he graduated with honors.
In his last year at the 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 Nikolai’s brother also connected to its development) were not grandiose: it was planned to create an online community for students, which ultimately received the laconic name "Students.ru" and for some time remained closed to all users.
The site quickly grew in a functional direction and gained a lot of fans, so it was decided to call 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. Today, the growth of the social network does not stop, but Pavel Durov no longer takes part in its development: in 2014, he sold his stake in Mail.ru Group. The exact reason for this decision is still not known.
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, access to which in 2017 was required by the Russian government. 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 traveling from one country to another.
