[demosthanos]

> “They are all my children and will all have the same rights! I don’t want them to tear each other apart after my death,” he said, after revealing that he recently wrote his will.

I agree that it's pretty cringe to refer to all of them as his children when he's literally a sperm donor, but he definitely did call them that.

[mumbisChungo]

They're also literally his children.

[demosthanos]

That depends a lot on your definition of "children" and "father".

Many people with uninvolved biological fathers would disagree with you that the guy who impregnated their mother counted as their father, especially if they were raised by another man who actually did stick around, and that's even for dads who actually impregnated the mother. Sperm donation takes this even further because he claims to have actually done it anonymously [0], meaning he's as uninvolved as he possibly could have been in the process of being a father.

Many or most of these kids have real men who were actually there helping to raise them through their childhood who they refer to as "father", and it's pretty disrespectful of Durov towards those men to attempt to usurp that title on the grounds of what was supposed to be an anonymous donation.

I'll grant that Durov is more likely than most sperm donors to have some of these kids actually claim him as their father, but that's in no small part because there's now a substantial amount of money tied to them identifying him as such. Cynically I wonder if that's a major motivator for him doing this, because he knows that the kids wouldn't otherwise know or care who he is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328289

[bpodgursky]

To be fair there's not really a good word standardized for what you're describing ("biological progeny without parental relationship"). People are going to use shorthand if they don't have a good term.