💀
Where did the old Durov go?⚫️ A few days ago, Kirill Filimonov from Dayte TON! (Give me TON!)
recorded an eight-minute “obituary” for TON as it exists today, going through the mistakes of its former leadership and Pavel Durov himself. We won’t dwell on the voice message itself. What interests us more is something else: Kirill is far from the first person to point out how much attitudes toward Durov — once a hero to many — have changed over the past couple of years.
⚫️ Everyone remembers the old Durov persona: a reclusive geek dressed in black, rarely giving interviews and openly inspired by Neo from The Matrix. Today, we see someone who jokes on stage that none of his friends were scammed through Mini Apps while “all of them got richer,” talks about having a hundred biological children, and fails to deliver on his own promises. So how did we get here? That’s what today’s subjective #opinion is about.
⚫️ We think the Durov image everyone had grown used to started visibly cracking in 2024. After several years of rapid Telegram growth amid the war conflict, the platform got another wave of attention around Mini Apps: tap-to-earn games suddenly went mainstream, putting TON and Telegram right at the center of the trend. For the first time in years, Durov had a product success big enough to break far beyond Telegram’s usual audience. That was when he stepped out from behind the product: taking the stage at TOKEN2049, sitting down with Tucker Carlson — which spawned the “two chairs” memes — and talking publicly about his sperm donations.
⚫️ It’s hard not to notice that Musk entered the picture around the same time. Elon reacted to Pavel’s story about having a hundred biological children, the two followed each other and started interacting more often on X. By 2025, Musk himself had gone far beyond being just a tech founder: he had grown close to Trump and the new administration and became the public face of DOGE — a government-efficiency initiative with an obvious nod to the memecoin he had spent years shilling on X. We wouldn’t be surprised if, to Durov — who has always held Musk in high regard — this looked like a whole new level of personal influence.
⚫️ Unfortunately for Pavel, the Grok story turned into a pretty brutal reality check. In spring 2025, Durov announced a Grok integration and a one-year partnership with xAI as if the deal were already signed. A few hours later, Musk publicly undercut the announcement by saying that nothing had been signed yet. We don’t know exactly why the two ultimately failed to get the deal over the line or what killed the partnership. But it is telling that Durov, who once seemed to need nobody’s approval, suddenly wanted to show how close he was to Musk and how big the deal was going to be. Somewhere around here, the old Neo persona may have finally disappeared.
⚫️ The old Durov largely let the results speak for him. Telegram used to build Pavel’s reputation; now the order often feels reversed. First comes the promise, then comes the wait for the product to catch up. Gram Wallet, which Durov promised to launch back in the summer, is
just another detail in that picture. Maybe that’s why there seems to be less and less of the old Pavel magic left today.
@thedailyton
