The sperm belonged to Pavel Durov, billionaire founder of the messaging app Telegram.
At conferences, on social media and on news sites, the clinic described Durov as having “high genetic compatibility” and noted he would pay for in vitro fertilization for women under 37 who wanted to use his “in-demand” sperm.
A banner on the website of the clinic, called AltraVita, still advertises his “biomaterial” next to a photo of the CEO and a Telegram logo.
“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, adding 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 effort adds to a biological lineage that Durov, now 41 and based in Dubai, said in a public post on Telegram spans at least 100 children in at least 12 countries—not counting the six other children he conceived with three different mothers.
The Russian-born CEO said in his post in July 2024 that he started donating sperm sometime around 2010. At first, he gave to a friend trying to conceive a child, and then anonymously, to alleviate a shortage of “high-quality donor material.”
Although he had stopped donating years ago, he wrote, his frozen sperm was still available at the AltraVita clinic.
This past summer, Durov sweetened the deal during an interview with a French magazine, announcing that his biological children would receive an equal share of his inheritance.
Forbes pegs his net worth at $17 billion, though the bulk of that is based on the value of Telegram, which he said he plans to leave to a nonprofit foundation. Durov also owns an unspecified amount of bitcoin he says he bought in 2013. The declaration triggered a flood of messages from people claiming to be his offspring, Durov has said.
“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 on the Lex Fridman podcast in October. Durov has said he plans to open source his DNA so that his biological children can find each other.
Durov joins a small group of some of the wealthiest, most influential people on the planet pushing the boundaries of reproductive ethics and technology. Some are using genetic testing and exploring gene splicing to produce children with desired traits. Others, such as Elon Musk, talk about producing children as both necessary to offset declining population growth and a flex to colonize the galaxy with one’s descendants.
Durov has framed his sperm donations as an effort to help alleviate a shortage of healthy sperm and to incentivize other men to do the same. In the background is a broader worldview that at least some of Western civilization is in decline. Durov has often written about threats to freedom and privacy posed by tech regulations in Europe and elsewhere.
“A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast—while we’re asleep,” Durov posted about measures such as digital IDs and online age checks, as well as arrests over speech in social-media posts, in October. “We’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction—moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.”
Durov’s post last year that he had conceived more than 100 children drew a joking response from Musk, who himself has fathered at least 14 known children.
“‘Rookie numbers lmao’—Genghis Khan,” Musk wrote on X, obliquely referencing research that suggests some 16 million people globally may now be descended from the 13th-century warlord.
“brb, increasing unit limit,” Durov responded to Musk’s post, including a gaming meme from the classic space colonization game “StarCraft” with the quote, “SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS.”
The clinic
The chief marketer of Durov’s sperm is Moscow-based AltraVita, a private fertility clinic catering to wealthy Russians and international customers. The clinic says in promotional materials that it offers “selective” embryos screened for genetic disease.
It was founded by genetics and fertility specialist Sergey Yakovenko, who described himself in an interview with a Russian publication as Durov’s longtime friend. Yakovenko didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Durov “does not have any financial, managerial, or operational involvement with the clinic, nor does he follow its activities in any systematic way,” said Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Durov.
He remains in contact with the clinic’s director through “personal text exchanges once or twice a year, often on matters entirely unrelated to the clinic,” she added.
Yakovenko has also published papers on human cloning, and AltraVita was involved in a Russian effort that claimed in October to have successfully cloned a “record-breaking cow renowned for her exceptional milk yield” in southwestern Russia. The project was led by Altragen, a cloning company Yakovenko co-owns with an agricultural company.
Both AltraVita and Altragen “intend to further develop this area, attracting the attention of both the scientific community and the general public to the prospects of cloning and its possibilities,” AltraVita says on its Russian-language website.
AltraVita initially agreed to answer questions about the Durov-funded donation program, but later canceled the interview, saying Durov had directed the clinic to decline.
Durov said on Telegram last year that he was initially skeptical about sperm donation, but Yakovenko convinced him that it was his civic duty to give—both because of his good genes and because of a long-term trend of declining sperm counts and male infertility.
The program has gained particular resonance in Russia, which faces a persistent demographic crisis compounded by emigration and the war.
“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,” Durov wrote in the 2024 post on Telegram.
In his interview with the French magazine earlier this year, he attributed a “rapid drop in sperm concentration in men in many regions of the world” in part to plastic pollution, calling it a threat “to our survival.”
AltraVita advertises the option for clients to do genetic testing of their embryos and see their sex.
Durov wasn’t involved in the selection or medical testing of potential mothers, which involves the same battery of exams as the clinic uses for normal IVF patients, the former AltraVita doctor said.
“Suddenly here’s a chance: It’s paid for, and the donor is someone so successful, intelligent and handsome,” the doctor said.
Anna Panina, a 35-year-old from Moscow, said that she has considered participating in the program.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to become the mother of a beautiful and intelligent human being,” she said.
The billionaire
Born in 1984 to educators in what was then Leningrad, Durov has long been fascinated with language and history. He first rose to fame in 2006 for creating VK, a Facebook clone that earned him the moniker of Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg. He founded Telegram in 2013, shortly before he was pushed out of VK.
Durov, who almost always wears black—except when posing for shirtless photos with six-pack abs—espouses a libertarian view of the world, rejecting alignment with states and centralized power. He has long painted his app as a means of resistance to authoritarianism, both in Russia and the West.
For years he funded it himself and through borrowing, but the app has since become profitable, with more than 1 billion monthly active users. The company told potential buyers in a bond issue that it generated more than $500 million in profit last year, according to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Largely uncensored, Telegram positions itself as a neutral ground in conflicts like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The app has also been criticized as a hotbed of extremist propaganda. The company says it blocked more than 42 million groups and channels that violated its terms so far this year. And it has turned over internet-address data in some terrorism and criminal cases, law-enforcement officials say.
Durov was in headlines again last year when he was arrested in France and hit with preliminary charges of illegal activity on Telegram, such as drug trafficking or child pornography, and refusing to cooperate with police.
Durov denies the charges and says French police were using the wrong email address when seeking help with criminal cases. The French investigation is ongoing, and prosecutors have said that Telegram’s cooperation has improved.
In his personal life, Durov pursues a health-conscious lifestyle, eschewing alcohol and caffeine, and promoting exercise and long nights’ sleep.
Durov fathered his first two children with a girlfriend while still running VK, in 2009 and 2010. It was sometime around then that Durov said he started donating sperm to AltraVita.
He then fathered three children, who were born in Russia between 2013 and 2017, with Irina Bolgar, a lawyer who now lives in Switzerland.
They are now in a dispute. Bolgar said that she had a relationship with Durov for a decade. Then things soured, she said, and by 2023 Durov cut off all financial support to her and her children, including terminating the lease on what had been their Geneva home, after she refused to move her children to Dubai, she said. That year, Bolgar also filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland against Durov that alleges he hit the youngest of their children on five occasions. She declined to comment on the criminal complaint.
Spurgeon, the Durov spokeswoman, said that the allegations in the complaint never occurred and were made as part of a “contentious custody dispute” initiated by “a person seeking to extract money” from her client. She added that Bolgar and Durov were never a couple and that Durov “provides financial support to all his children,” including a $7 million prepayment of child support to Bolgar in 2019—which Bolgar contends had been a personal gift to her.
Bolgar has posted on Instagram about Durov’s pride in alleviating the shortage of healthy sperm.
“In other words, his mission is to spread his sperm across the world,” she wrote.
After Durov went public last year with his sperm donation, Russian news outlets found and published a profile from an unnamed Moscow sperm clinic for “Donor No. 6” that matched his description. The profile listed the donor as a brown-haired, brown-eyed Russian programmer and entrepreneur who studied multiple languages. The profile describes his character traits as “hardworking, goal-oriented, decisive, true to his principles, lover of freedom.”
The profile also included a Russian-language philosophical quote that Durov had posted to his VK page in 2012: “A person cannot become truly free while existing in the dead-end ‘slave-master’ paradigm. In this system, every master is someone else’s slave, and every slave is someone else’s master.”
On AltraVita’s website, the banner advertisement for Durov’s sperm now displays his photo in front of the text, “your number six.”
After he revealed his more than 100 offspring in 2024, AltraVita also started a marketing push naming him.
Durov relocated Telegram to Dubai in 2017, citing its political neutrality, limited red tape and low taxes. A few years later, he was granted citizenship in the United Arab Emirates and France.
In December 2024, Durov had a child with an ex-girlfriend, Hungarian model and influencer Diana Bako. She said on social media last year and this year that she was living in Dubai, and her child’s two grandmothers were there to help with the baby.
Images from Bako’s baby shower were set in a 14,000-square-foot rental villa on one of Dubai’s palm islands, which markets itself as offering eight luxury bathrooms, VIP suites and a “massive assorted candy wall.” Bako didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Durov’s current girlfriend, Juli Vavilova, is an online influencer who has posted that she had a miscarriage in France after Durov’s arrest in 2024. At a charity ball earlier this year tied to the Cannes film festival, Durov paid 400,000 euros in an auction to win Vavilova a walk-on role in a Spike Lee movie. Vavilova didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Durov said in the podcast interview that he wants to delay when the children get their money because he believes growing up without wealth helped him develop drive and focus.
Durov has also said he hopes his example will encourage other healthy men to donate sperm.
“Of course, there are risks,” Durov wrote on Telegram in 2024, “but I don’t regret having been a donor.”
Write to Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
