🎉 Telegram Premium now has over 15 million paid subscribers. The number has doubled in just one year. Thank you for going Premium! ⭐️

🇦🇪 I’ll be in Dubai the first week of June — good news ahead.

#Telegram is set to raise at least $1.5 billion in a new five-year bond issue on Wednesday, despite its CEO Pavel Durov facing preliminary criminal charges in France for allegedly failing to assist authorities in tackling illegal content on the platform. Telegram and Durov deny the claims, asserting full cooperation with lawful requests.

The bond, offering a 9% yield, will help Telegram buy back debt from its 2021 bond issue maturing in March 2026. Investors include existing bondholders like BlackRock and Mubadala, with new support from hedge fund Citadel and others. The bond offers a convertible option into shares in case of an IPO—though such a move appears unlikely soon due to legal and market conditions.

Despite Durov’s travel restrictions—he remains in #France and was denied permission to visit the U.S.—Telegram’s growth continues. The app reached 1 billion monthly active users in March and now has 15 million paid subscribers, double the previous year.

Telegram posted a 2024 profit of $540 million on $1.4 billion revenue, rebounding from a $173 million loss in 2023. For 2025, it projects over $700 million profit on $2 billion revenue, thanks to monetization strategies like ads, digital in-app purchases, and developer partnerships.

“We complied with all the binding legal requests we received. So up until this day, we don’t understand what we did wrong,”

-Durov