Telegram’s Founder Plans to ‘Open Source His DNA’

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, posts like your friend who sends those weirdly horny emoji laden chain texts to the group chat. It was between a mind-blown emoji and a flexing-muscle emoji that Durov told the public he had more than 100 biological kids and planned to open source his DNA to help them find him.

“🤯 I was just told that I have over 100 biological kids. How is this possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone? 🤨” Durov said in a post on Telegram.

He explained that, fifteen years ago, a friend asked him to donate sperm at a clinic to help them because they were having trouble conceiving.

“👨‍⚕️ The boss of the clinic told me that ‘high quality donor material’ was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples,” Durov said in his post. “This sounded crazy enough to get me to sign up for sperm donation 🚬.”

Fast forward 15 years and, according to Durov, his sperm has helped more than 100 families in 12 different countries. Even better, his little guys are still on tap at a Moscow IVF clinic. Now, he says, he wants to help all those kids figure out who their sperm donor was.

“Now I plan to open-source my DNA so that my biological children can find each other more easily. 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 💪,” he said.

IVF is a miracle for families that can’t conceive and, on one hand, it’s good to see a rich tech billionaire promoting it, especially in America where state-level anti-abortion laws and an evangelical voting bloc are attacking it. “🚀 I also want to help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it, so that families struggling to have kids can enjoy more options. Defy convention—redefine the norm! ✊”

Setting aside the nobility of attempting to normalize IVF, this is a deeply weird post, right? It is one thing to say you’ve been a sperm donor, it is another to unfurl the banners and put out the call to find the children your sperm helped make possible.

An obsession with falling fertility rates and spreading one’s own seed is de rigueur among the elite. There’s Simone and Malcolm Collins, the terminally online pro-natalist Redditors who share a Twitter handle, London think tanker Aria Babu, and—of course—Elon Musk. Musk is the father of at least 12 kids, constantly frets over falling birth rates, and reportedly volunteered his sperm to help jumpstart human civilization on Mars.

In promising to “open-source [his] DNA,” Durov is introducing a new model for wealthy narcissists who want to see their genes reach deep into the future: Spread your seed, give the children a chance to locate each other, and hope they find a way to cement your legacy—no inheritance required.