During an interview with Tucker Carlson aired late Tuesday, Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov said he has held a few hundred million dollars in fiat or bitcoin for the last 10 years.
“For me, I would rather make decisions that would influence how a billion people communicate rather than choosing the color of seats in the house that only I and my relatives from probably a bunch of my friends will see,” he added. Durov explained that the idea for Telegram came when the pair were still based in Russia, working on their social networking platform VK. “We had this very stressful situation where armed police would come to my house and try to break in because I refused to take down opposition groups . I wanted to tell my brother what's going on to coordinate whatever we want to do I realized there is no secure means of communication.