The Russian billionaire who founded messaging app Telegram is fighting infertility, but he isn’t using his wallet — he is using his own sperm.
Pavel Durov, 41, has offered to cover the full cost of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment for women under 37 who want to conceive using his sperm.
The tech entrepreneur claims to have already fathered at least 100 kids through sperm donation, in addition to six tots from three different partners.
Durov, who is worth close to $17 billion, described his donations as his “civic duty” to help tackle the shortage of “high quality donor material” and de-stigmatize he notion of sperm donation.
The billionaire has also said that all of his children, regardless of how they were conceived, will one day inherit a share of his massive fortune.
“As long as they can establish their shared DNA with me, someday maybe in 30 years from now, they will be entitled to a share of my estate after I’m gone,” Durov said during an interview on Lex Friedman’s podcast in October.
In a separate interview with French magazine Le Point, the tech founder said: “I make no difference between my children.”
Durov has publicly linked falling sperm counts and infertility worldwide to environmental factors, including pollution from plastics, and has said he is happy to help address the issue.
The Wall Street Journal reported in an in-depth profile of Durov that the billionaire’s sperm is a hot commodity.
Last year, dozens of women responded to an advertisement offering Durov’s sperm for free at a clinic in Moscow, according to the Journal article published Monday.
At public forums, on social media and on websites, the fertility clinic described Durov as having “high genetic compatibility” and noted he would pay for IVF for women under 37 who wanted to use his “in-demand” sperm.
While Durov no longer donates sperm directly, samples from his earlier donations reportedly remain stored at the Moscow-based Altravita Clinic.
“The patients who came, they all looked great, were well-educated and very healthy,” said a former doctor at the clinic, who examined several volunteers.
He added that participants had to be unmarried to avoid legal complications.
“They wanted to have a child from, well, a certain kind of man. They saw that kind of father figure as the right one,” the doc was quoted as saying.
He noted that Durov was not involved in the selection of women who would get his sperm.
In a Telegram post in July 2024, the Dubai-based billionaire confirmed that his sperm is “still available.”
To avoid legal complications, however, access to the samples is restricted, and only unmarried women aged 37 or younger are eligible to use them, according to the clinic.
The Altravita Clinic, which serves a wealthy Russian and international clientele, was founded by Sergei Yakovenko, who is also a friend of Durov’s. Although Yakovenko is no longer involved with the clinic, he is said to have told Durov that sharing strong genetic material could be seen as a social responsibility at a time when male infertility is on the rise.
Yakovenko did not comment to The Journal.
Durov is part of a small group of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet invested in pushing the boundaries of reproductive ethics and tech, the newspaper noted. While some tech billionaires are using genetic testing and exploring gene splicing to produce children with desired traits, others such as Elon Musk have championed producing as many children as possible in order to offset declining population growth.
Durov has said his sperm donation began in 2010 when he agreed to help a friend who was struggling to have children, but he continued donating after being told by fertility specialists that there was a shortage.
The chiseled Telegram founder said in a post on his platform: “My past donating activities has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids.”
He also announced plans to “open-source” his DNA so his biological children can easily locate each other.
Durov added: “Of course there are risks, but I don’t regret having been a donor. The shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, and I’m proud that I did my part to help alleviate it.”
His first foray into fatherhood came when he had two children with a girlfriend in 2009 and 2010, before going on to welcome three more with Irina Bolgar, a human rights lawyer who lives in Switzerland.
According to reports, the pair are currently locked in a legal dispute in which she claims that in 2023, he cut off all financial support to her and her children.
She also filed a criminal complaint alleging he hit the youngest of their kids on five different occasions, The Journal reported. A rep for Durov has denied the allegations.
The prolific parent launched Telegram in 2013, having previously created Russia’s social media platform VK.
Telegram now has more than 1 billion active users globally and has become one of the most influential messaging platforms in the world.
Durov is currently in a relationship with online influencer Juli Vavilova, who has posted on social media that she suffered a miscarriage in 2024.
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