The 5 Most Interesting Businessmen Alive...

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
These are the five most interesting businessmen alive. These are going to be eccentric billionaires, people who not only have a crazy business life, but also have a crazy personal life, and have just done a variety of wild shit. These are people that they should be making movies about. So we got a list.
Can I start it off with number five? We're going to go five to one, one being who we crown as the most interesting man alive. The criteria for this, by the way, is they got to be interesting. So not just rich, not just successful, but fascinating, interesting.
That can be good and bad. They have to be men. We have a separate list coming for women and they have to be alive. So nobody who is some dead historical figure. Fair enough?

**Shaan Puri** (0:51)
Yeah, you're going to kick it off?

**Sam Parr** (0:52)
Yeah, I'll kick it off. Okay, so number five is a guy who won the game twice and on his way out the second time is just flipping the bird to everybody. And this is a guy named Pavel Durov.
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I call this guy James Bond with Wi-Fi.
If you see this guy's Instagram, you'll know why I said it. He looks like James Bond. He travels around the world. He's an international man of mystery, but he built his claim to fame as using his laptop, using Wi-Fi. So this guy's basically the Russian Mark Zuckerberg. He, it's even more impressive than Zuck. So when he was young, he built the Facebook of Russia and it was called VK. And what's cool about this is two things. Number one, he actually beat Facebook.
So there were many countries in the world where somebody built the Facebook of Brazil, the Facebook of Africa, the Facebook of Europe.
There has been tons of these. And in every single one of them, the end game was, no, no, no, Facebook is the Facebook of Brazil. Facebook is the Facebook of India. And Facebook dominated everywhere. The one place they couldn't dominate was Russia. And in an interview, Zuck was talking to Sam Altman and he even said, he's like, God, the only ones we could ever beat were the Russians. He was like, it was insane. He's like, we would make a change. And literally like 12 minutes later, they would have that update on their side. Like if we moved a pixel, they moved that pixel. And he's like, these guys were just the most prolific copiers we've ever seen. And we just could not figure out how are we ever gonna overtake them if they're the world's smartest mathematicians and programmers who are dedicated 24 seven to beating us or cloning us and doing exactly what we do if they can't come up with a better idea. And so he gave them a hat tip. So he creates VK, it becomes the Facebook of Russia. He won, but he had to sell it because one day, the Russian government approaches him and says, Pavel, we need some information. He's like, cool, what do you need to know?
We need some information about all your users and what they're saying. And he's like, what, why? And they're like, well, there's been some users who were saying some anti-government things.
As you know, that's not how we do shit around here. So give us some names and we'll make sure that they get quiet.

**Shaan Puri** (3:32)
And while you're at it, drop your pants and bend over and cough.

**Sam Parr** (3:37)
So he doesn't want to do it. And so what Pavel does, and by the way, this is not like, you know, this is not just a business move. This is not a lawyer sending you a cease and desist. When the Russian government comes knocking, there's serious consequences for what you decide to do after that. You comply, great.
If you don't comply, there's not only consequences for those people they were after, now there's consequences for you. And so what he does is he not only doesn't comply, he flips the bird. So he goes and he posts on VK, the government request, the memo that they, the secret like kind of letter that they sent him telling him what they needed. He said, they're asking for your data. I'll never do it.