It's a simple statement. You confuse naïveté with stupidity. If there is a "ceiling" as you describe, then Sergei and Larry must have godlike intelligence to have 20,000 engineers working for them.

The point is not "I'm not capable of coding this, I must hire someone smarter", it's "I'll manage someone to do the coding I don't have time for, and they can observe my attempts to run the rest of the business (or whatever)."