How Telegram makes money: Principles over greed | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman

I have to ask you about the big picture of Telegram. We've already talked about the fact that you own 100% of it and there's a lot on the business side of it. The business structure of Telegram is fascinating. You've invested hundreds of millions of dollars of your own money. As far as I know, you take a salary of what? $1.

And in 2024, Telegram was profitable for the first time. So one of the interesting questions here, that we could talk for many hours about, but I'd love to get a high-level picture. You've left, what I understand, a huge amount of money on the table by sticking to your principles. For example, not doing advertisement based on user private data, which basically every social media company does. So the only advertisement that Telegram does is based on channels and groups based on the topic, not the private data of individuals. And the other thing, which is also gangster and incredible, is you don't do a newsfeed, which is the most addictive and engagement-inducing aspect of social media, feeding the addictive downside of the internet: the distraction, the engagement, drama farming aspect that we've talked about in the beginning that you tried to resist, that you think is damaging the human mind at scale. So anyway, that's just speaking to the fact that you're leaving a lot of money on the table. So how the hell were you able to be profitable? What are the ways that Telegram makes money?