On 24 August, a private jet landed at a French airport. On board was a man in his later thirties known to possess a fortune which, according to Forbes magazine’s latest estimate, amounted to $15.5bn (£11.7bn). The man was promptly arrested by French police. Soon afterwards, the value of toncoin, the cryptocurrency he had created, plummeted by more than 15%.
President Emmanuel Macron, referring to the arrest, said that the country was “deeply committed to freedom of expression” but that “in a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life.”
Obviously, this was about more than cryptocurrency. In fact, the authorities suspected the man on the private jet of indirect involvement in paedophilia, terrorism, money laundering, etcetera. So why the defensive tone in the president’s remarks?
It turns out that Macron has been known to enjoy more convivial engagements with the jet setter who had touched down at Bourget airport that day. He was even willing, in happier days, to furnish the Russian with a French passport. Crucially, the man taken into custody had more than a cryptocurrency in his resume. This was Pavel Durov, the head of Telegram.
Exiled US whistleblower Edward Snowden was duly incensed: “The arrest of Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association. I am surprised and deeply saddened that (French President) Emmanuel Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means to gain access to private communications. It lowers not only France but the world,” he said.
Snowden became a naturalised Russian citizen in 2022. He accused Macron of seeking access to private communications on Telegram, many of which would have been made by Russian nationals like himself, some of them as part of the war effort.
Pavel Durov was not a household name by the time of his arrest unless that household was within the territories of the former Soviet Union. Telegram itself was often cited when Yevgeny Prigozhin was busy plotting his aborted coup. Much later, in the context of the race riots in the UK over the summer, it was known to be favoured by rioters to coordinate their attacks on the hotels housing asylum seekers.
But it was only in relation to these sinister developments that the name Telegram was vaguely familiar to Western ears. Hard to believe, with all the attention that Elon Musk has received since his purchase of Twitter, that Telegram now threatens to outgrow X with over a billion users.
Condemnation from a competitor
As if to demonstrate that there is honour among tech billionaires, Musk has denounced the arrest of his competitor and even created a #FreePavel hashtag to support him. Unsurprisingly, he has also enlisted Durov in his free speech cause. Musk’s Russian counterpart is happy to call himself a libertarian and shares Silicon Valley’s fixation with absolute freedom of speech. That this concept runs into the kind of pitfalls any schoolboy could have predicted is an indication of just how unintelligent the tech bros’ fixations can be.
It’s debatable whether this is deliberate crassness on their part or an actual detachment from the reality we all inhabit. The fact that Musk so often betrays his own principle by withdrawing from the fight if he is attempting to curry favour with his adversary suggests that his constant protestations are, at best, disingenuous. So far, he has complied with 83% of the requests of authoritarian governments to remove content from X. It is simply cheaper to cave in. Ironically, among the 70% of staff members sacked by the great libertarian were some of the legal team, the very ones who used to push back against such requests.
But Musk and Durov have more in common than their insistence on the freedom to say whatever one likes. They also share eccentric tendencies. It would be hard not to notice Durov’s penchant for dressing in black, for example. This fashion choice owes its origin to Keanu Reeves and the actor’s black garb in The Matrix.
He is also, to the obvious delight of his detractors, a prolific donor of his own sperm. He claims to have fathered in this way more than a hundred children in 12 different countries. When asked why, he explained that it was to help destigmatise the topic, adding that he first donated sperm to help a friend struggling with infertility and that he planned to “open source” his DNA.
This improbable titbit gave one of the tech bros’ most combative critics, Carole Cadwalladr, a handy metaphor, which she then applied to Musk in her latest, deafeningly shrill denunciation of her bête noire. After describing the ‘civilisational battle for the truth’ the world was now witnessing, a battle she said Musk was winning – though not, perhaps, in Brazil – she complained that: "(Musk’s) truth is simply louder, faster, disseminating further. His algorithms are spreading his metaphorical seed, spawning an entire generation of mini-Musks and would-be Musks who dream of electric Cybertrucks."
The moral is: never waste a good, if slightly prurient, metaphor.
Along with siring multitudes, Durov claims to have sworn off alcohol, coffee and red meat. His self-help advice, dispensed on Instagram, also includes the view that people should lead a solitary existence. If this is true, then the French would be wasting their time placing the Telegram boss in solitary confinement. On the contrary, his idea of hell would be a morning spent nattering with old lags over coffee.
But beyond the foibles and the customary fixations of the tech elite, what is really striking is Durov’s lack of contact with planet Earth and his cosmopolitan lifestyle. For over a decade since his bust-up with Putin over the enforced sale of VKontakte (or VK), Durov’s answer to Facebook, he has been a man of no fixed abode. He grew so fond of exotic passports that he went on to acquire one for an archipelago in the Caribbean called St Kitts and Nevis. Later, he wooed the aforementioned president of France, who handed him a French passport to add to his collection.
The fact that his love of France and its language have been repaid so shabbily by the French is a lesson to all tech billionaires to stay aloof and, in particular, to avoid making contact with European soil. As we shall see, certain Russian ideologues have not been slow to ram this lesson home. For them, Durov is a perfect example of how dangerous it is for Russia’s talented sons to quit the Motherland.
My first reaction on hearing of Durov’s arrest was ‘another day, another scandal in Laputa’. For those unfamiliar with Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels, it describes an island that hovered above the surface of the earth and was inhabited by mathematicians who ruled the earthlings beneath but who paid scant attention to them, as they were far too intent on solving abstract mathematical problems.
