search and it seems he's never been mentioned on CB.

Pavel runs a company called Telegram (a messaging app) with 900m active users (Twitter has about 350m active users). And not only does he run it, he owns 100% of it. Which certainly makes him worth tens of billions.

His company has only 30 engineers and they've never spent a dollar on advertising their app.

He owns no real estate - no planes - etc. Just wants to work on building his company.

He's Russian and grew up in Italy and Russia. He built a Russian social network company when he was 21. The Russian government forced him to sell it and leave the country because he wouldn't censor people and provide personal data of users. He's very much a free speech advocate - so much so that as a young man he left his home country because he wouldn't cave to government pressure.

He then tried to set up a company in Berlin, London, Singapore, and San Fran before deciding that the governments in those countries were making things too difficult for him so he left to Dubai.

It's going to be interesting to watch what happens to Telegram.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ut6RouSs0w