Durov's San Francisco Mugging Forced Telegram's Dubai Move

Pavel Durov had just left Twitter’s San Francisco office after meeting Jack Dorsey. It was around 8 p.m. He walked toward his hotel, phone in hand, posting about the visit. Three men approached without warning.

"Just three big guys tried to grab my phone from my hands," Durov later recalled. "I was tweeting about the fact that I just met the founder of Twitter." The men lunged. Durov refused to release the device. A brief struggle followed. Blood appeared. He broke free and ran.

"There was a short fight with the guys, there was a little bit blood involved, but I managed to run away," he said. The attackers had not expected resistance. Durov, smaller than the three larger men, escaped with his phone intact.

That evening marked a turning point. Durov had explored Berlin, London, and Singapore as possible homes for Telegram after leaving Russia. San Francisco seemed the obvious next step because major technology companies clustered there. The attack changed his calculation immediately.

The mugging carried extra weight because Durov had traveled extensively before that night. He had never been physically attacked on the street anywhere else. "This is the only country where I got attacked on the streets," he stated. The experience stood alone in his memory.

Other pressures compounded the decision. Every time Durov entered the United States, two FBI agents met him at the airport. On one occasion agents arrived at the house he was renting while he ate breakfast. Later, cybersecurity officials approached one of his engineers without his knowledge and encouraged the use of specific open-source libraries in Telegram’s code. Durov believed those libraries could serve as backdoors.

"The U.S. government, or maybe any other government," he said. "Because a backdoor is a backdoor regardless of who is using it." The pattern of attention felt systematic rather than random.

Seven years ago Durov moved Telegram’s operations to Dubai. In the years since, pressure from the UAE government has remained zero, he reported. The contrast with San Francisco proved decisive.

The street violence and government contacts together reframed San Francisco from promising location to untenable one. Physical safety and operational independence both appeared at risk. Dubai offered a different balance.

Telegram continues to serve hundreds of millions of users across Africa for communities, startups, crypto trading, and media distribution. Founders in the region regularly weigh similar questions of regulatory pressure, physical security, and jurisdictional risk when choosing headquarters. Durov’s experience illustrates one path through those trade-offs.

Recent events have renewed attention to Durov’s views on state pressure. He was arrested in France on 24 August 2024 and indicted four days later on twelve charges in a separate investigation involving Telegram. Coverage of that case frequently references his earlier comments on why the company settled in Dubai rather than Silicon Valley.

"It was a shock to me because I traveled a lot that was the first place I got attacked," Durov said of San Francisco. The memory still shapes where Telegram keeps its base and how its founder thinks about government demands anywhere.