Saturday, June 19, 2021

"The Telegram Billionaire and His Dark Empire"

From Der Spiegel, June 11:

Telegram is one of the world's most popular chat apps – and possibly the most dangerous. There is little regulation of the platform, which is popular with criminals and terrorists. Who is the mastermind behind it? 

Little is known about the Russian billionaire, who is considered to be the richest person in his adopted home of Dubai. And what he does say in public often sounds puzzling. "The outside world is a reflection of the inside one,” he wrote as the caption under his Instagram photo. 

Durov was still the head of the social network VKontakte, the Russian-language Facebook clone, which had more than 100 million users at the time. The Russian government was unhappy with the fact that opposition groups had organized the protests using the social network. The Russian domestic intelligence agency FSB demanded that Durov shut down the groups, but instead of obeying the order, he published the letter from the intelligence service on Twitter along with a photo showing a dog in a hoodie sticking its tongue out. Three days later, armed officers with the special Russian police force OMON showed up at the door of his luxury apartment. "They seemed to want to break the door,” Durov later recalled in an interview with the New York Times. He peered at the officers through his intercom monitor but refused to open the door. They left after an hour....

....MUCH MORE