Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging app, has revealed that he has fathered over 100 children in 12 countries through sperm donations.
The Russian IT entrepreneur said he started donating sperm 15 years ago when a friend approached him with a request that seemed unusual at first.
“He said that he and his wife couldn’t have kids due to a fertility issue and asked me to donate sperm at a clinic for them to have a baby. I laughed my ass off before realizing he was dead serious,” Durov explained in a Telegram post.
He quoted doctors as saying that “high quality donor material was in short supply” and that it was his “civic duty” to donate sperm anonymously to help more couples. “This sounded crazy enough to get me to sign up for sperm donation.”
Durov said he now intends to disclose his DNA code to make it easier for his biological children to find each other. “My past donating activity has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids. Moreover, many years after I stopped being a donor, at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids.”
Durov, who is unmarried, says he realizes “there are risks” but doesn’t regret having been a donor.
A shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, Durov lamented, adding that he is proud that he “did my part to help alleviate it.”
Commenting on Durov’s revelation, US billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said on X (formerly Twitter) that having 100 biological children was “rookie numbers,” jokingly attributing the quote to Genghis Khan. Historians claim the 11th-century Mongol ruler was estimated to have had between several hundred to a thousand or more biological children.
Earlier in July, Musk refuted claims by the New York Times that he had volunteered his sperm to help populate a future Martian colony.
Musk has fathered 12 kids with three women, and welcomed a new baby with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis earlier this year.