Why does this billionaire have 100 kids in 12 countries?
Pavel Durov is a Russian-born billionaire whose interests include doing half-naked photoshoots with baby goats and having lots and lots of (human) kids. The 40-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram revealed last year– in a post on his own app – that while he isn't married and prefers to live alone, he has over 100 biological children in 12 countries via sperm donation.
Durov's reproductive choices made headlines again this week after the tech tycoon told the French political magazine Le Point that he is going to leave his fortune, estimated at almost $14bn, to all of his children. Durov has six children he fathered naturally with three different partners as well as the children he has via sperm donation.
'They are all my children and will all have the same rights. I don't want them to tear each other apart after my death,' he told Le Point.
What possessed Durov, who was charged last year in France over allegations that Telegram is being used for illicit activity, to populate the world with so many mini-mes? (He has denied failing to cooperate with authorities and Telegram has denied having poor moderation.) Well, like Elon Musk and a number of other tech types, Durov is a pronatalist who is worried about global fertility rates declining. He's chosen to take a hands-on approach to tackling the issue, funding free IVF treatments for women at AltraVita IVF Clinic in Moscow for anyone who uses his sperm. If you're interested, and I'm sure that a lot of people will be now that Durov has laid out the terms of his will, he's still got sperm on ice at the clinic.
Durov first donated his sperm over 15 years ago, in order to help a friend. Then, he said in his Telegram post last year, he realised he ought to donate more widely. 'The boss of the clinic told me that 'high quality donor material' was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples,' Durov said in the post. Durov added that he wants to 'help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it.'
Having used a sperm donor to conceive my own child, I'm all for destigmatizing sperm donation. Particularly as there is a major lack of sperm donors among certain demographics: at one point last year, for example, there were only a dozen Black sperm donors at the four main cryobanks in the US.
But, and this is a very big but, there is an enormous difference between destigmatizing artificial insemination and one person thinking it is their 'civic duty' to conceive 100-plus children. Allowing a single individual to procreate so prolifically raises complex ethical issues. There's the possibility of accidental incest in the future, as well as the potential psychological impact that stems from someone discovering they have 100 siblings. There are also potential medical problems: earlier this year it was reported that the sperm of a man with a rare cancer-causing mutation was used to conceive at least 67 children.
Is Durov even allowed to donate to so many different couples? The short answer is yes. The law regarding how many children can be conceived from one donor is complicated and varies from country to country. In places like France there are strict national limits while in the US (and Russia) there is no national law limiting the number of donations one person can make. Reputable cryobanks, however, do claim to have their own self-imposed limits. The European Sperm Bank applies a worldwide limit of 75 families for each sperm donor. California Cryobank, one of the largest providers in the US, has said it tries to limit donations to about 25-30 families.
However these cryobanks are also extremely expensive, particularly after the pandemic, when shortages meant spermflation kicked in, and there is a completely unregulated market for sperm via Facebook groups and private websites where people can match with potential donors. This has allowed unscrupulous people like Jonathan Jacob Meijer of the Netherlands to father hundreds of children.
As artificial insemination becomes more common, there is a desperate need to better regulate the industry and limit the number of children conceived from a single sperm donor. Indeed, Sweden, along with seven other countries including Belgium, raised the topic with EU ministers this week. 'This issue has been left unresolved for too long,' an official from Belgium told POLITICO, adding that an 'international limit is a first step in the right direction.'
Let's hope that these limits get put in place sooner rather than later. Because I have an inkling that Elon Musk, who seems to be going a little off the rails, might take all the chatter about Durov's progeny as a personal challenge.
These include messages like: 'Did you know that the unborn child is discarded as hospital waste?' The Guardian reports that this is the 'latest example of a growing trend across Brazil to further restrict access to abortion in a country that already has some of the world's most restrictive laws'.
The caveat here is that overdiagnosis could be contributing to this increasing. Per Axios, one study 'found that routine skin exams have increased and pathologists now more often classify ambiguous lesions as melanoma'. (You should still get yourself checked and avoid tanning beds!)
The judge who did this is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who previously worked for a conservative Christian legal activist group and has made his anti-abortion views very clear.
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Hundreds of ambitious conservative women gathered at the Young Women's Leadership Summit this week, an annual conference organized by the rightwing Turning Point USA. They wore buttons that said things like 'My Favorite Season Is the Fall of Feminism' and 'I Don't Need a Degree to Succeed' while listening to inspiring lectures about how their real calling in life is to stay in the kitchen. At one point Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder, encouraged a high school freshman to focus on husband-hunting rather than higher education. 'I think there's an argument to bring back the 'MRS degree',' Kirk said.
We've got to bomb the oppressed brown women in order to liberate them, don't you understand? Mona Eltahawy looks at the weaponization of women's rights to justify war from Afghanistan to Iran.
In 2024, weightlifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Vox looks at changing body ideals and the way in which strength training ushers in 'a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller'.
The president's granddaughter, clearly inspired by Trump's fake shift at McDonald's last year, posted a video of herself 'working' at Dunkin' Donuts.
A wild monkey in Hong Kong recently went viral after getting filmed tearing up a sign telling people not to feed the animals. While no monkeys were available for comment, I suspect this may be a case of gorilla warfare.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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Times
6 hours ago
- Times
Will a chatbot give me a job? I put AI recruitment to the test
The pot plant on the filing cabinet behind my interviewer's head needs water. Its curling leaves distract me as the floppy-haired recruiter in a crumpled black polo shirt poses his next question: 'In the role of tax consultant at McKinsey, balancing technical expertise with interpersonal skills enhances client relationships. Can you share an example of how your organisational skills and multitasking have benefited a specific task?' I gabble through my recent work organising a large charity auction in my spare time, while juggling work deadlines and three busy children. The interviewer nods, looking impressed. 'It's fantastic that you bring those soft skills to the table.' The grilling goes well until I hit some actual tax questions and stumble. My two decades in business journalism will not, it's clear, secure me a role as one of McKinsey's newest tax consultants. But thousands of words of post-interview feedback arrive seconds later, and they are gently encouraging. 'You demonstrated your ability to mobilise resources and engage others … but need to practise emphasising how your unique abilities will benefit the company.' Impressive — since the whole recruitment process was carried out by robots. For £70 a month, website Final Round AI offers mock interviews with a human-like chatbot. Its questions are honed to any job listing you provide plus your CV. McKinsey had no involvement with the process, but one of its applicants might well have practised here first. The CV I used was concocted by AIApply, which also makes cover letters specific to the demands of any job posting. A monthly subscription costs £23. Before interviews, it provided a list of likely questions alongside what it deemed perfect answers. No need to learn them, though; for £29.99 a month the Interview Buddy app offers 'real-time assistance during job interviews, helping you answer questions confidently'. Using this app during my mock video interview, it perfectly detects questions and rapidly bashes out uninspiring but detailed and accurate responses. Propping up my phone next to my webcam, I can easily reel off these AI responses to the, er, AI recruiter's questions: This may sound outlandish, but it's happening: TikTok hosts thousands of videos of candidates undertaking real interviews while using ChatGPT-fed answers. Human resources might need to be redefined as inhuman resources: hiring work often pits employers' AI systems against candidates' AI-generated responses. Amid the frenzied talk about how AI is going to transform our working lives, in recruitment, it already has. More than two-thirds of HR professionals use AI at work in the UK, according to research by tech firm The Access Group. That's far higher than in the EU, where it's only 38 per cent of firms, according to European tech firm SD Worx. Anyone who hasn't applied for a job in five years will find being hired is an entirely new process. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) now scan and rank CVs and cover letters based on the inclusion of set keywords to whittle down the number of candidates, meaning a human may never see the majority of CVs sent in for a role. Those who make it through may then face 'asynchronous video interviews', where candidates are filmed answering written questions that flash up like a PowerPoint presentation, before AI systems assess their answers, or chatbot-led interviews, like mine. Recruiters have the upper hand: the number of job vacancies in the UK has dropped from 1.3 million in 2022, to just 761,000 in the three months to April. The concurrent adoption of AI by employers and applicants has created a race to the bottom. Firms are receiving an influx of thousands of chatbot-generated applications, while candidates report feeling dehumanised by the process. 'It was awful,' communications manager Laura Andrews said of a recent AI-led job application for a UK water utility. 'After an automated email saying I had been shortlisted, I had a video interview with a slideshow of questions listed on screen. It was really strange not having any kind of response from an interviewer to know how it was going. Without human interaction, my personality didn't show, and I think for neurodivergent people, it would be very hard.' Weeks later, Andrews still hadn't heard back. 'I was ghosted, which is usual with roles now,' she added. 'I applied for more than 100 jobs in three months, and 80 per cent of the time I heard nothing at all. 'I couldn't contact the interviewer, as they didn't exist. When I chased with the recruiter, I was told it was a 'system error'. That's the flavour of the job search now: being AI-led, companies don't seem to care about candidates. The lack of feedback or even acknowledgement of applications that take hours to tailor felt isolating.' This is a common complaint, according to Amelia Miller, whose start-up, Ivee, helps women return to work after a career break. 'Recruitment used to be a human process. Now, jobseekers are up against AI algorithms. The current market isn't sustainable. Recruitment teams are drowning in job applications with features like LinkedIn's 'easy apply' [which allows candidates to submit their CV in just a few clicks], along with hundreds of emails and messages. I believe this will lead to the death of the job application,' she said. In the US, some recruiters have already moved to 'agentic AI', relying on bots to handle the admin of organising job interviews. But while some claim that AI's transformation of the job search removes human bias, others say it embeds it. University of Washington research used real CVs but varied names associated with white and black jobseekers into AI recruitment systems, and found AI favoured the white-associated names 85 per cent of the time. Female-associated names were picked only 11 per cent of the time. 'If we're not careful, AI will just automate discrimination at scale,' Miller added. Khyati Sundaram, chief executive of the ATS firm Applied, added: 'AI interviewers trained on datasets dominated by American speakers, for example, can be biased against candidates with different accents, non-native English speakers or individuals with disabilities that affect their speech. 'When assessing candidates' facial expressions, eye movement, hand gestures and tone of voice, biased bots can also favour those with a neurotypical communication style. Candidates who communicate differently can be ruled out of the running, regardless of [their] skills… reinforcing existing workforce inequalities.' Not all candidates despise the changes, however. Rachel, a jobseeker who did not want her surname published, said ChatGPT and its rival, Claude, were 'huge timesavers.' 'I used them to refine cover letters, tailor them to job descriptions, and insert the right keywords,' she said. 'Recruiters are using AI, so I need to speak their language to pass the screenings. ChatGPT stripped out my personal attachment to my CV and showed me what was key and what was fluff, and what recruiters would ask me. It takes the legwork out of applications.' To those returning to the job market after a long time, the recruitment landscape will 'feel very alien,' Miller acknowledged. 'The best thing you can do is learn how to use AI. Avoid applying for jobs on inundated sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed, and turn towards company websites and niche job boards to lessen the competition. Focus on building your network: ask for warm introductions and leverage the human element of recruitment as much as you can.' The job market is being taken over by algorithms, but for now, the human touch still opens some doors. 'The market's more competitive than ever and the sheer number of tools and platforms can feel overwhelming,' says Kevin Fitzgerald, UK managing director of recruiter Employment Hero. 'Your CV has to be AI-literate.' Here are his tips on how to get it right: Match the job description: Use the exact keywords and phrases from the job ad, especially for skills, tools and job titles. Keep formatting simple: Stick to clean layouts. Avoid graphics, columns etc, as they can confuse Applicant Tracking Software. Stick to Word or PDF. Use specific, hard skills: List tools or certifications relevant to the role such as Xero, Python, CRM management. Quantify your achievements: Add real numbers where possible such as 'cut costs by 15 per cent' or 'trained five new hires'. Avoid generic buzzwords: Terms such as 'motivated' or 'team player' don't help. Use language that's specific and meaningful. Tailor your CV every time: Make slight edits for each application. Use AI tools but edit carefully: ChatGPT and other AI tools can help draft or refine your CV, but always review for tone, accuracy and clarity. It should still sound like you.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Why does this billionaire have 100 kids in 12 countries?
Pavel Durov is a Russian-born billionaire whose interests include doing half-naked photoshoots with baby goats and having lots and lots of (human) kids. The 40-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram revealed last year– in a post on his own app – that while he isn't married and prefers to live alone, he has over 100 biological children in 12 countries via sperm donation. Durov's reproductive choices made headlines again this week after the tech tycoon told the French political magazine Le Point that he is going to leave his fortune, estimated at almost $14bn, to all of his children. Durov has six children he fathered naturally with three different partners as well as the children he has via sperm donation. 'They are all my children and will all have the same rights. I don't want them to tear each other apart after my death,' he told Le Point. What possessed Durov, who was charged last year in France over allegations that Telegram is being used for illicit activity, to populate the world with so many mini-mes? (He has denied failing to cooperate with authorities and Telegram has denied having poor moderation.) Well, like Elon Musk and a number of other tech types, Durov is a pronatalist who is worried about global fertility rates declining. He's chosen to take a hands-on approach to tackling the issue, funding free IVF treatments for women at AltraVita IVF Clinic in Moscow for anyone who uses his sperm. If you're interested, and I'm sure that a lot of people will be now that Durov has laid out the terms of his will, he's still got sperm on ice at the clinic. Durov first donated his sperm over 15 years ago, in order to help a friend. Then, he said in his Telegram post last year, he realised he ought to donate more widely. 'The boss of the clinic told me that 'high quality donor material' was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples,' Durov said in the post. Durov added that he wants to 'help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it.' Having used a sperm donor to conceive my own child, I'm all for destigmatizing sperm donation. Particularly as there is a major lack of sperm donors among certain demographics: at one point last year, for example, there were only a dozen Black sperm donors at the four main cryobanks in the US. But, and this is a very big but, there is an enormous difference between destigmatizing artificial insemination and one person thinking it is their 'civic duty' to conceive 100-plus children. Allowing a single individual to procreate so prolifically raises complex ethical issues. There's the possibility of accidental incest in the future, as well as the potential psychological impact that stems from someone discovering they have 100 siblings. There are also potential medical problems: earlier this year it was reported that the sperm of a man with a rare cancer-causing mutation was used to conceive at least 67 children. Is Durov even allowed to donate to so many different couples? The short answer is yes. The law regarding how many children can be conceived from one donor is complicated and varies from country to country. In places like France there are strict national limits while in the US (and Russia) there is no national law limiting the number of donations one person can make. Reputable cryobanks, however, do claim to have their own self-imposed limits. The European Sperm Bank applies a worldwide limit of 75 families for each sperm donor. California Cryobank, one of the largest providers in the US, has said it tries to limit donations to about 25-30 families. However these cryobanks are also extremely expensive, particularly after the pandemic, when shortages meant spermflation kicked in, and there is a completely unregulated market for sperm via Facebook groups and private websites where people can match with potential donors. This has allowed unscrupulous people like Jonathan Jacob Meijer of the Netherlands to father hundreds of children. As artificial insemination becomes more common, there is a desperate need to better regulate the industry and limit the number of children conceived from a single sperm donor. Indeed, Sweden, along with seven other countries including Belgium, raised the topic with EU ministers this week. 'This issue has been left unresolved for too long,' an official from Belgium told POLITICO, adding that an 'international limit is a first step in the right direction.' Let's hope that these limits get put in place sooner rather than later. Because I have an inkling that Elon Musk, who seems to be going a little off the rails, might take all the chatter about Durov's progeny as a personal challenge. These include messages like: 'Did you know that the unborn child is discarded as hospital waste?' The Guardian reports that this is the 'latest example of a growing trend across Brazil to further restrict access to abortion in a country that already has some of the world's most restrictive laws'. The caveat here is that overdiagnosis could be contributing to this increasing. Per Axios, one study 'found that routine skin exams have increased and pathologists now more often classify ambiguous lesions as melanoma'. (You should still get yourself checked and avoid tanning beds!) The judge who did this is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who previously worked for a conservative Christian legal activist group and has made his anti-abortion views very clear. Sign up to The Week in Patriarchy Get Arwa Mahdawi's weekly recap of the most important stories on feminism and sexism and those fighting for equality after newsletter promotion Hundreds of ambitious conservative women gathered at the Young Women's Leadership Summit this week, an annual conference organized by the rightwing Turning Point USA. They wore buttons that said things like 'My Favorite Season Is the Fall of Feminism' and 'I Don't Need a Degree to Succeed' while listening to inspiring lectures about how their real calling in life is to stay in the kitchen. At one point Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder, encouraged a high school freshman to focus on husband-hunting rather than higher education. 'I think there's an argument to bring back the 'MRS degree',' Kirk said. We've got to bomb the oppressed brown women in order to liberate them, don't you understand? Mona Eltahawy looks at the weaponization of women's rights to justify war from Afghanistan to Iran. In 2024, weightlifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Vox looks at changing body ideals and the way in which strength training ushers in 'a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller'. The president's granddaughter, clearly inspired by Trump's fake shift at McDonald's last year, posted a video of herself 'working' at Dunkin' Donuts. A wild monkey in Hong Kong recently went viral after getting filmed tearing up a sign telling people not to feed the animals. While no monkeys were available for comment, I suspect this may be a case of gorilla warfare. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Do electric vehicles make people more carsick?
With electric cars skyrocketing in popularity around the world – in 2024, 22% of new car sales worldwide were electric vehicles, compared with 18% in 2023 – a growing body of studies and an increasing number of people have found that they feel more motion sick riding in EVs than in traditional petrol or diesel cars. Anecdotes of feeling sick in the passenger or back seat of electric cars litter social media, as do questions from wary prospective buyers. There is a scientific explanation behind why a person might feel more sick in an EV, though, according to multiple academic studies. 'Greater sickness in EVs can be attributed to a lack of previous experience, as both a driver and as a passenger, where the brain lacks accuracy in estimating the motion forces because it relies on previous experience in other types of cars,' said William Emond, a PhD student researching car sickness at the Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard in France. Though EVs are becoming more popular, combustion cars still dominate. Riders have a longer history with gas cars and so have had more time to adapt to their specific cues. If a person has spent most of their life driving a combustion engine car, their brain anticipates acceleration after the rev of the engine, a warning that they are about to experience a change in speed. In a battery-powered car, the electric motor makes no such noises. In addition to general unfamiliarity, research has found links between specific features common to electric vehicles and motion sickness. One 2024 study concluded that there were strong correlations between motion sickness severity and the seat vibrations of electric vehicles, while a 2020 study found that the lack of engine sound in an EV might be a major contributing factor to increased feelings of carsickness. 'If we are accustomed to traveling in non-EVs, we are used to understanding the car's motion based on signals such as engine revs, engine vibrations, torque, etc. Yet, traveling in an EV for the first time is a new motion environment for the brain, which needs adaptation,' Emond explains. Additionally, the regenerative braking technology used in EVs – where the motor converts the slowing car's kinetic energy into electricity that then is stored in the battery – results in low-frequency deceleration, meaning that the vehicle slows down gradually and steadily, over a relatively longer period, rather than rapidly or in quick pulses. Such low-frequency deceleration tends to be associated with higher levels of motion sickness. A 2024 study suggested the feature acted as one of the main triggers of motion sickness in electric vehicles. The study's authors wrote: 'Our results confirmed that higher levels of RB [regenerative braking] can induce MS [motion sickness].' Motion sickness is thought to be caused by a mismatch between various sensory signals the brain simultaneously receives about the body's movement. Specifically, it happens when the inner ear, which helps control balance, the eyes, and the body send conflicting information to the brain. 'Better knowledge on self-motion allows us to anticipate motion forces, which is crucial for motion sickness. Yet, when the motion forces as estimated or anticipated by the brain differ from what actually is experienced, then the brain interprets this 'neural mismatch' as a situation of conflict,' Emond said. 'If this conflict persists over time, it may surpass a threshold for triggering autonomic reactions of the body such as symptoms apparent to 'motion sickness'.' Being able to anticipate the movement of a vehicle appears to be integral to the experience of motion sickness, which is why people who are driving a car don't tend to experience symptoms. They know what is coming. The interplay between anticipation of motion and actual motion experienced may be why EVs are associated with worse motion sickness, as these vehicles provide fewer clues regarding upcoming movements. 'When discovering a new motion environment, the brain needs to habituate because there is no knowledge of previous experience in such a context. This is, for example, why almost everyone becomes sick in zero-gravity environments,' Emond says. As EV ownership continues to increase, some researchers are already looking into a solution for the cars' specific type of nausea. Several research papers have suggested that motion sickness in autonomous EVs could be treated by using visual signals, such as interactive screens and ambient lighting, or vibrational cues to allow a passenger's brain to anticipate motion changes, alleviating the lurching feeling in the back of an electric taxi.
