Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has announced his intention to bequeath his estimated $17 billion fortune to his 106 biological children, but this distribution will not occur until the year 2055.
Gatekeepers News reports that an interview with the French magazine Le Point on Thursday, the 40-year-old tech entrepreneur explained that this delay is intended to allow his children to develop independence before they gain access to their inheritance.
He said, ”I wrote my will very recently… I decided that my children would not have access to my fortune until a period of thirty years has elapsed, starting from today. I want them to live like normal people, to build themselves up alone, to learn to trust themselves, to be able to create, not to be dependent on a bank account.
”I want to specify that I make no difference between my children: there are those who were conceived naturally and those who come from my sperm donations.
“They are all my children and will all have the same rights. I don’t want them to tear each other apart after my death.”
Durov explained that six of the children were conceived naturally with three different women, while the rest were born via sperm donation across a dozen countries over the past 15 years.
”Six of whom I am the official father, whom I had with three different partners. The others come from my anonymous donation. The clinic, where I started donating sperm fifteen years ago to help a friend, told me that more than 100 babies had been conceived this way in 12 countries, ” he said.
According to estimates from Bloomberg and Forbes, each child could potentially inherit between $131 million and $161 million based on Durov’s current net worth.
Durov’s announcement comes amid ongoing legal challenges that Durov is facing in France. He was detained in August 2024 at Bourget Airport near Paris upon his arrival from Azerbaijan on a private jet.
