$220M is not pocket money, but Durov's net worth is apparently $17.2B, so he could afford it for a few more years

https://www.forbes.com/profile/pavel-durov/

He was listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2021, with a net worth of $17.2 billion. His fortune is largely driven by his ownership of Telegram

- Wikipedia.

So billions from Telegram, a free app. What am I missing?

That's a valid point. It's free now but they do have some plans for monetization (ads in channels with huge numbers of subscribers etc.)

Thanks for this, what about Moxie? Who covers those costs?

Signal is funded by a $50M donation from Brian Acton, who made billions selling WhatsApp to Facebook.

Telegram isn't end-to-end encypted except for some 1:1 chats. The unencrypted chat data is likely being sold, as their privacy policy allows.

At least the story of them being dodgy (in terms of origin/funding) and playing up encryption which is not enabled by default is pretty well documented by now. I get that people really like the UX of the app, but I wish more of them approached Telegram with "Russian gov has access to my unencrypted messages, but maybe the encrypted ones too" mindset.

If that is the case normies living outside of the sphere of Russian influence have little to worry about surely. Better Russia than your own government.