Pavel Durov on having 100+ children | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

The truthful answer to this question is I don't really know how many biological kids I have exactly because at a certain point in my life, about 15 years ago, I decided that it was a good idea to be a sperm donor. Initially, a friend of mine asked me to help because they were trying to have a baby with his wife and they experienced certain health issues that prevented them to do it the natural way. He told me, "We don't want to just rely on some random anonymous genetic material. We want somebody we know and respect to be the biological father of our kid." And I said, "You got to be kidding me. Sounds ridiculous. What are you even talking about?" But then I realized it's actually a serious issue, and they were not the only couple struggling with that. So eventually I got persuaded into doing more of it. I can't say I'm incredibly proud of that, but I think it was the right thing to do, particularly at the time when I thought, "Okay, I probably don't have much time on this planet left. Things are getting trickier and trickier. So if I can help some couples have babies, let's do it."

And then more recently, when I was working on my will, I realized that I shouldn't make a distinction between the kids conceived naturally and the kids who are just my biological kids that I never seen. As long as they can establish their shared DNA with me someday, maybe in 30 years from now, they have to be entitled for a share of my estate after I'm gone. And that made a lot of noise in the news for some reason. People get very excited by this kind of news. I got a lot of messages from people claiming they're my kids. I got a lot of requests from people asking me to adopt them. The memes were priceless. But understanding that, no, it's not a thing that most people do. I don't see anything wrong with it. If anything, I think more people should be donating sperm.

Yeah, I think overabundance paralyzes motivation and willpower. It's extremely harmful particularly for young boys to grow up in an environment where they can be proud not of their own achievements, but of their father's achievements, of their father's wealth. This removes the incentive to work on developing their own skills, remove the incentive to study, to work. So I thought if they're going to have this money, it should be something that they would only get when they're already adult. It's still risky, but one of the reasons I decided it makes more sense to divide this huge wealth that I'm likely to leave behind among a 100 or more than 100 people is that it won't be too much for every single descendant.