Musk starts a new bromance with trapped Telegram founder Durov

Elon Musk’s break with Donald Trump may appear rash from a business point of view. Tesla lost $152.4bn of market value on Thursday and the total value of his SpaceX company’s contracts with the US government is $89.2bn.

But there are signs Musk knew what was coming – and was getting prepared. In recent weeks, he has sought out ways to shore up parts of his corporate empire before all hell broke loose. He made some calls. And just as one bromance was beginning to implode, another was getting started.

Musk lately held a rendezvous in Paris with Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram and another of tech’s most controversial figures, with the aim of sketching out a deal that could have unknowable consequences for facts and the truth. It could also be a boon for Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI at a time when it is seeking a $113bn valuation.

Details emerged on 28 May, when Durov announced a partnership with Grok, the chatbot owned by xAI, that could allow it to feed on data from his messaging platform. The deal would allow Grok access to the data of any of Telegram’s 1 billion users who interact with it – far more than the 600 million users that the chatbot has exposure to via X, formerly Twitter.

Given Grok’s recent ramblings about “white genocide” in South Africa – blamed by xAI on an “unauthorised modification” of its code – the partnership has the potential to turbocharge toxicity on Telegram, a messenger turned social network already rife with conspiratorial and extreme content.

In return for integrating Grok with Telegram’s data, Durov claimed Musk would be paying $300m. “This summer, Telegram users will gain access to the best AI technology on the market,” Durov posted on X, where he follows one person – Musk. “Together, we win.”

But there was a hitch. “No deal has been signed,” Musk wrote below Durov’s post. The next day, Durov scrambled to explain. “True. Agreed in principle, but formalities are pending,” he posted. Embarrassingly, a community note highlighting Musk’s response was added to Durov’s original post on X. Durov seemed to have jumped the gun. The announcement happened to coincide with a $1.7bn sale of bonds in his company.

The deal, once finalised, would mark the culmination of a lengthy tech bromance like few others. On the face of it, Durov and Musk seem to have little in common. Durov’s background is mainly in social media, while Musk’s is in everything from rockets and electric cars to brain implants and tunnel construction. One is a Russian émigré and recluse who surfaces once in a while to rail against American tech; the other is a ubiquitous presence in the media.

The affinity started with Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2022. Musk, who brought an actual kitchen sink into the headquarters of the company he had just purchased for $44bn, immediately started transforming the microblogging site into the anarchic X. He bulldozed through the trust-and-safety and moderation teams, ripping out policies and systems that had taken years to build. By the end of a cull that would later be repeated with the US government, about 80% of Twitter’s staff had been axed.

Musk’s inspiration for the cull was, at least in part, Telegram. According to the account in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, Musk stalked Twitter’s corridors considering who to fire and which offices could be turned into accommodation so that staff could work there 24/7. He and his coterie wondered why his new company could not be more like Telegram, which had only 60 employees and a light moderation regime, yet many more users. The feeling was that Twitter – soon to be X – should emulate Telegram’s streamlined model. Durov admired the overhaul. Speaking to ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson last year, he praised Musk for making X more tolerant of vitriol – or, in his view, pro-freedom of speech. Musk replied to a clip of this part of the interview with one word: “Cool.” Durov might have felt vindicated: the “free speech absolutism” he had long promoted was now in vogue in the US.

After Donald Trump won a second term, Meta’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, signalled his intention to stop “apologising”. Posting about Meta’s new moderation policies, Durov noted that Telegram had supported a more lax approach to hate speech “long before it became politically safe to do so”.

Durov’s libertarian attitude to the internet has thrust him into the frontline in the battle between platforms and governments, particularly in Europe. After arriving in Paris last year, Durov was detained by French police in relation to brazen criminality on Telegram that they alleged he had wilfully ignored. Durov and Telegram were accused of failing to respond to a long list of legal requests.

Durov was ultimately charged with complicity in drug trafficking, fraud, organised crime and child sexual abuse material. With investigations continuing, he is not allowed to leave France without judicial permission. If convicted, he could be jailed for 10 years.