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Comment by osipov | Hacker News Reader

Pavel is widely seen by the Russian developer community as a sort of a douchebag who flaunts his wealth in ways that would seem crass to someone from Silicon Valley. Just look at the guy throwing paper planes made from money at a crowd of onlookers: http://youtu.be/2pxTpFqX6rI?t=25s

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I believe this was after a VK executive received a bonus from the company and someone had made a joke along the lines of "look you've made it".

The employee responded to say that money wasn't his motivation. Instead, it was the idea of creating and building stuff.

To prove his point, he threw the bonus money out of the window in paper planes.

This could imply that money really wasn't/isn't the motivation.

Maybe, this was slightly foolish given the media's/public interpretation. I don't think this act had a "douchebag" intention.

I view money planes as a joke. In any case, which is better, openly giving money away, or secretly colluding to keep employee wages down? Personally, I prefer his "crassness" to the crassness of the SV elite.

No one objected to his "openly giving money away"; it was that he made a public display of basically pissing it away, and watching the commoners scramble for it. And what starts with sophomore-level crassness the sort Durov made himself famous for tends to morph into the more genteel, but systematically more pernicious (that is to say: white-collar) crassness you're referring to, later on.

Unfortunately, to a great many people in the Valley, that kind of behavior wouldn't seem all that crass at all. Many would find it quite "cool", in fact.

Perhaps I am looking at the wrong part of the said developer community, but I haven't noticed that. In the mainstream news he was indeed painted as a nouveau riche, but then you have to wonder if that was (not) related to the hostile vKontakte takeover by the state.

Any other douche incidents aside from these money paper planes?

To be fair, that's bush league in the realm of Russian wealth douchbaggery.

Do you have any other examples of him flaunting his wealth? The money planes was a dumb thing to do, but that's the only example I've ever heard anyone bring up.

Flaunting your wealth in ways that other Russians think crass now that is impressive :-)

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